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Comment by didibus | Hacker News Reader

> The reason is pretty simple which is with these AI tools you for the most part replace writing code with writing a prompt

I'm convinced I spend more time typing and end up typing more letters and words when AI coding than when not.

My hands are hurting me more from the extra typing I have to do now lol.

I'm actually annoyed they haven't integrated their voice to text models inside their coding agents yet.

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GitHub copilot already does have speech to text and as my sibling comment mentions, on the Mac, it is globally available. It varies according to typing and speaking speed but speaking should be about five times faster than typing.

On a mac you can just use a hotkey to talk to an agentic CLI. It needs to be a bit more polished still IMO, like removing the hotkey requirement, with a voice command to break the agents current task.

Does it use an LLM powered voice to text model ?

I find the generic ones like the ones I can use anywhere on Mac to be crap.

If you've used the ChatGPT voice to text model you know what I mean.

I believe it does on newer macs (m4 has neural engine). It's not perfect, but I'm using it without issue. I suspect it'll get better each generation as Apple leans more into their AI offering.

There are also third parties like Wispr that I haven't tried, but might do a better job? No idea.

Have you tried Soniox? It's really not expensive ($0.12/h, $200 free credits when you sign up) and really accurate.

https://soniox.com/

You can use it with Spokenly (free app, bring your own Soniox API key) on macOS and iOS (virtual voice keyboard)

https://spokenly.app/

Disclaimer: I've worked for Soniox

Why would I buy this if my Mac has it for free? Is it “just better”?

The mac one is pretty limited. I paid for a similar tool as above and the LLM backing makes the output so much better. All my industry specific jargon gets captured perfectly whereas the Apple dictation just made up nonsense.

It's really accurate and supports 60+ languages

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