How to use Speech to Text in your Daily Workflow to Increase Productivity

Hi 👋

I'm Kourosh, and I spend 70% of my day in front of the computer.

Writing on the keyboard has never been my strength.

Not just because of my speed of typing, but also because I tend to overcomplicate my writing (German school system and stuff).

Recently I started using various speech-to-text tools and my brain and fingers are thanking me for it.

In this blog post, I'll show you how I use voice dictation to:

• Increase my writing speed
• Boost my productivity
• Write clearer, more natural text, emails, documents, and messages

I am a product manager, so in my daily life, I'm writing lots and lots of things.

Emails, Slack messages, documents, customer support messages, etc.

The tools I use:

1. Voicy - A free speech to text chrome extension that adds voice dictation features to every text field on the internet
2. Notion's in-built speech-to-text tool
3. ChatGPT's voice mode

Better customer support with speech-to-text

As a product manager, I get a lot of my customer insights from chats with real users. This often happens in various customer support chat platforms, like Crisp.

On any given day we can get up to 100 messages from users who need help.

Typing every response out is (a) tiring, and (b) time-intensive.

Using Speech-to-text tools I can simply just say the words I want to say and they instantly appear on the screen. Easy.

But here's the real benefit:

Ever since I started dictating my messages, my wording has become so much simpler to understand.

We don't often notice this, but we are much easier to understand when we're talking conversationally - and users love it.

Better emails with speech-to-text

Do you know the pain of spending way too long on a 4-sentence email? Yeah, me too.

I hate emails, I really do.

But still... writing good emails is important, especially at my job.

I still don't want to spend too much time on them though.

I tried out Gmail's in-built dictation feature but here's why I didn't love it:

• It wasn't perfectly accurate.
• It didn't automatically add punctuation to my sentences.
• It felt janky at times.

Instead, I now use Voicy for all my emails in Gmail.

• It's perfectly accurate.
• It automatically adds punctuation.
• It even adds the right formatting to my emails.

Check out the video below to see how I use it:

Writing documents with speech-to-text

As a product manager, whenever we launch a new feature, I have to sit down and write very lengthy documentation and how-to guides for the feature.

This is a notoriously disliked aspect of the product manager's role.

I hate it. Even with speech-to-text, I still do.

I've probably spent a week of life just coming up with the perfect starting sentence.

Here are the benefits of using speech-to-text for writing documents:

• Increased speed (of course)
• Clearer, more easily understandable text
• Great for brain dumping and editing later

This has become my new workflow for writing documents:

• Load up Google Docs
• Enable Voicy
• Start recording myself
• Spit out an entire document within 10-20 minutes
• Final editing

Overall I've been able to cut down the time I spend on each document from 1 hour to maybe 30 minutes.

Enhanced UX writing with speech-to-text

UX, or user experience design, isn't just about designs and flows within software. It's also about the language you use to explain your software and speak to your users.

Great products use writing that is (a) easily understandable, (b) to the point, and (c) effective in explaining the next steps.

Turns out that speaking is much closer to those 3 points above than writing is.

For example, let's talk about messaging your customers on WhatsApp by using Crunchzapp.

Crunchz provides a simple API that we can use to speak to our users via WhatsApp.

Rather than sitting down and coming up with the perfect 30 words for my user, I just say what I would say if they were right in front of me.

I can actually use Voicy right within the Crunchzapp dashboard to do that.

Simple. So simple, so effective.

Conclusion

Everyone only talks about speech-to-text tools as a productivity enhancer, but that's barely half of the story.

Speech-to-text allows us to express ourselves more clearly, more naturally, and without having to worry about punctuation.

It takes away a lot of guesswork and saves mental calories.

Additionally, let's not forget about the huge accessibility benefits that speech-to-text brings. For some of us, these tools make our jobs easier. For others, these tools make their jobs possible in the first place.