I like talking to my computer

When I was a kid I remember going to a friend’s house and trying his Pentium computer, which costed a ton of money back then. His father bought it to him and I remeber him saying that it could write in a word document with a microphone. That look like the future, honestly. The demo we did actually didn’t work, it wasn’t a big problem though because we just wanted to play video games. So we played a little bit GP2. That was much better.

These days I’m a software engineer. It’s about 30 years later than that and finally, speech recognition seems to work. We can blame AI for a lot of things, I’m no fan, but this speech thing is actually working pretty good.

I grew up a lot and i started to have some problems that older people have. I hurt my right hand and I couldn’t use my computer without having discomfort. For this reason I went on a journey trying to use my keyboard and mouse less. On this journey, I met other people with problems and I learned that gosh speech recognition is amazing now. So I’m trying to always talk to my computer.

I’ve been programming with speech recognition. I don’t do this with those special programs that you use to write programs, but I’m doing it by talking to LLMs. I learned that I prefer to talk than to write to them. I don’t know why, it’s just an experience thing. It feels stupid to write to them, because I know that if I have to write, I can as well write the program myself, most of the times. When talking.. talking is a completely different thing. It feels like exploring opportunities and different options. And that has been a lot better than writing those options myself.

My hand is getting better, but it’s not perfect yet and sometimes it regresses slightly. I plan to keep using voice detection, for a while longer as I find it a better way to interact with my phone and my computer. Heck I wrote this post with it (with some manual edits, it’s not perfect). I worked the whole past week with it and I will keep doing it.

I know it sounds weird, a month ago I would have said this was stupid, but I think you should give it a try. For once, I feel excited about technology. I feel excited because this technology is really augmenting me, it is making me do things that I couldn’t do otherwise, it is making me overcome physical pain, it is making me stay productive in different situations and in different ways. This is what technology is for. After the AI hype is gone, I hope we will be left with responsibly trained models that are more distributed, that slop will go away and leave space to actually useful things like this one. And I’m hopeful that we’ll find a way to make AI augment humans and not replace them, because replacing them is just plainly stupid.