Stop Using Your Keyboard and Start Using Handy, a Free Speech-to-Text App

If old science fiction No matter the show, we are all using our computers wrong. We are still typing with our fingers like cavemen, instead of talking out loud the way we were supposed to in the future. Have you ever seen Picard touch a keyboard? no way.

And this is strange because our computers are able to convert speech to text by default. Problem? This doesn’t work very well. Or, at least, it didn’t. In recent years, AI models such as Nvidia’s Parakeet and OpenAI’s Whisper, both open source, have made great strides in converting human voices to text. Both are excellent at adding punctuation and capitalization correctly, and you can run them directly on your computer. Using these models is the closest I’ve felt to recording a captain’s log – it just works.

Problem? Setting up both of them is a bit complicated. This is where comes handy. This is an extremely simple, completely free application that can set up any of these models on your computer and give you a keyboard shortcut to use it. It was created by C.J. Pace after he broke his finger, leaving him unable to type. He wanted a completely free and radically simple way to use existing AI speech-to-text tools.

Simply download Handy to get started—versions are available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Run the application and you will be asked which model you want to use.

Courtesy of Justin Pott