Voice dictated prompts

I can type over 100 words per minute. I've been proud of that for a long time, to the point of—for better or worse—considering it part of my personality.

But there's just something about writing prompts that I find so laborious. It feels like micromanagement. Having to write out a task in full instead of just doing it.

Fortunately, I have found a way to reduce the friction of writing prompts: I don’t write them at all; I say them.

In fact, I barely “wrote” any of this course. The words you are reading right now, I spoke into my microphone and cleaned up with AI. What a time to be alive.

While there are many voice dictation tools available, and your system likely comes with one built in, I have found Superwhisper to be an excellent choice. It's free to try.

List the planets of our solar system from smallest to largest. Measure by diameter in kilometres. Ignore dwarf planets. 

You should get a nicely formatted response.

You may need to modify the prompt after it is transcribed to include markup for examples or URLs to more documentation.

If for some reason you're not happy with Superwhisper, there are alternatives that will perform similarly.

• VS Code Speech is an extension by Microsoft for use in VS Code
• Wispr Flow is a similar OS application with some additional features

Now we’re more comfortable with prompting, let’s add some guardrails to the results.