I have been using speech to text / voice typing to write articles on techtippr. I have also written an article where I mentioned how to write faster. Voice typing has enabled me to write articles 3x faster.
Because,
We can talk faster then we can type.
My Previous Writing Process
Though, my process of writing article was something like this,
- I had Google Docs opened on my computer, and enable voice typing by pressing Shift+ Command +S.
- After I am done with the article,
- I copy the entire article into WordPress and make corrections to it.
Though there are no issues with this kind of workflow, I wanted to know if it is possible to directly voice type in WordPress, so that I won’t have to write everything in Google Docs and then copy it back to WordPress.
I found a couple of plugins that enabled voice search in WordPress, but it’s not something that I was looking for.
One particular plugin that I was able to find in the WordPress repository which offered voice typing had a very confusing layout, and the plugin required Google Chrome to work. So it’s better to install a Chrome extension since adding plugins to the blog will only increase the load time of the website.
My Current Writing Pro ess
So here is an even better solution, to use a Chrome extension named VoiceIn Voice Typing, and the reason it is better than having a plugin in WordPress for voice typing is that it can be used anywhere and not just in WordPress editor.
Also, if you have got multiple blogs when you don’t need to install the voice typing plugin on every blog, just install the Chrome Extension and you are good to go.
Again, like I mentioned in my earlier article that the voice typing feature does not work everywhere.
If you are in a crowded place then it may not work if you are using the inbuilt microphone of your laptop, but since most of my writing process is done in my home office it works perfectly. You anyway would not be using voice typing in public, or are you?
The limitations of voice typing Chrome extension
The only limitation I was able to find in my brief usage is that it does not work in WYSIWYG interface of WordPress editor, to use the voice in voice typing extension you need to switch to plain text format, and then switch back to the visual format once you are done writing the article.
Also, if you have to have to add a line when you are making corrections in the visual format, then you will either have to type using the keyboard or switch to the text mode, which is quite confusing since you have to find where to place the cursor to type the extra line you want to type.
Over the years, this chrome extension has fixed the limitations, I posted about it in this article. Updated in 2023.
In 2023, a lot of productivity tools are powered by ai, I think voice typing has got the maximum benefit of AI, with LLM models like Whisper from OpenAI, we have a lot of tools that will give you accurate transcriptions.
Tools like AudioPen, has greatly reduced the creation process by automating fixing the first draft into something usable. Even I have created an iPhone shortcut called Dictation Pro, which use is ai to fix grammar and errors and gives out perfect transcriptions.
Best party is it works on iPhone and automatically save the text in the Notes app, which is available on all the apple devices.
How is the accuracy in comparison to Google Docs?
I found the accuracy of this voice typing extension to be pretty good since VoiceIn uses Google’s speech recognition engine, it is almost similar to what you type in Google Docs but a convenient way to type anywhere you want.
