Think about all the notes you write each day – notes from your meetings, todo lists, ideas, journals and anything else that you might record… that’s a lot of typing.
Now imagine how much quicker it would be to capture all of that by just speaking, rather than smashing the keyboard (and fixing your errors along the way).
Transcription has been an elusive dream promised for decades. Finally, in the last few months, this dream has become a reality. New, state of the art AI technology allows us to transcribe our voice with human level accuracy. Already it’s completely changing the way we write and take notes.
Voice notes combined with LLMs
What's changed? Well, Transformer technology, or to be specific, OpenAI's Whisper has heralded a new dawn for transcription. There is a huge difference between transcription that's 80% accurate and transcription that's 99% accurate. This improvement means that it's now feasible to transcribe all your notes verbally.
But still, humans love to ramble, and just doing pure voice transcription is not enough. Thankfully, at the same time Whisper technology came along, we also have large language models which can clean up our text. All we need to do is record a voice note and AI can act as both our copy editor and assistant.
The future
I think ultimately all of us would like our own personal Jarvis, an AI bot that we can chat to that will automatically record notes but also queue up tasks, to-dos; a thought-partner to work with, and a personal assistant outside.
Ultimately we might not even be using voice to communicate with this AI. It's feasible to think that we'll just have little sensors reading our thoughts to communicate back and forth. This is a fascinating step in the co-evolution of human and machine.
Start taking voice notes by journaling
Today, you can start using voice notes inside of Reflect.
We’ve integrated OpenAI’s Whisper technology into web, desktop and mobile apps providing human-level transcription quality.
You can start transcribing notes by clicking on the microphone icon in the sidebar. Transcriptions will be appended to today’s daily note.
We also pass the result of your transcription through GPT-3.5 to nicely format it and polish the edges.
Be warned - we have found there is a bit of an adjustment curve. Speaking into our notes can feel a bit odd at first.
A great way of getting over this uncanny feeling is by recording a daily reflection.
Just before nodding off, reflect on your day. It doesn’t have to be complicated, just describe your day - what you accomplished, what you’re grateful for, and anything nagging your mind.
We have found this incredibly helpful to unwind. It’s as useful for organization as it is for therapy.
