Dictating blog posts into Emacs
| emacs, speech-recognitionMatt is experimenting with dictating his blog posts. He says:
I write really well. I have very good grammatical skills, for the most part, when I’m typing. But when I speak, I don’t speak like that. My grammar is not very good. I say words out of order a lot. I have filler words. And I say things that don’t make any sense.
This is totally me too! It's one of the reasons why I want to get used to dictation, because it'll give me a lot more practice in saying things, which can only help when I'm making videos or talking to people.
While I’m talking, the text that’s outputted has no punctuation or paragraphs or anything like that.
Oh yeah, no, that's mostly a matter of picking the right speech recognition engine. For example, I'm using a local instance of Orukeet, and it seems to do a reasonable job of dividing my thoughts into properly-capitalized and punctuated sentences in both English and French. In fact, I have some code in Emacs that wraps it to one sentence per line (as part of sacha-whisper-insert which uses sachac/whisper.el). This allows me to use Org shortcuts to move lines around in order to reorganize them into something that makes more sense.
Some people use large language models to clean up raw transcripts and remove false starts or filler words.
I don't quite trust large language models to leave my wording alone.
I have some code that uses replace-regexp-in-string to take out some of my filler words and fix commonly misrecognized words that I've saved with substitute.el.
I'm not sure if I was ever any good at multitasking, but nowadays at 43 years old, I find that talking and typing at the same time has gotten a little bit harder for me. I type much more slowly if I want to narrate things at the same time, like when I'm recording a video or live streaming. When I'm just thinking on my own, I type quickly enough that my computer sometimes jumbles the keystrokes up because it doesn't handle keyboard interrupts well when it's busy. It's not just my fingers; it sometimes happens even when I was trying to use wdotool to simulate typing. Speech recognition is surprisingly reliable, even though I have to correct it from time to time. The broad strokes are there, and I save the recordings so that I can fix misrecognized words.
I also love the way that speech recognition opens up so many more possibilities for commands I would never be able to memorize keyboard shortcuts for. "Remind me today to…" is now one of my favourite ways to capture an Org Mode task.
Besides, I think it's a good idea to plan ahead just in case I can't type very well in the future. All sorts of things can happen: accidents, disease, old age. I wrote about that a bit more in Emacs Carnival Oct 2026: Exploring keys and voice input in Emacs.
All that to say: exciting times ahead. I think it would be pretty amazing if this sort of thing allows more people to write and share. Looking forward to reading (and possibly listening to) what people have been learning about!

