Stop using your keyboard and start using Handy, a free text-to-speech app

If the old science fiction the shows are something to behold, we all use our computers badly. We keep typing with our fingers, like cavemen, instead of speaking out loud like the future was supposed to be. Have you ever seen Picard touch a keyboard? Of course not.

And it’s strange because our computers are all capable of transforming speech into text by default. The problem ? It just doesn’t work very well. Or at least it doesn’t. In recent years, AI models like Nvidia’s Parakeet and OpenAI Whisperboth open source, have made great strides in transforming human voices into text. Both excel at adding things like punctuation and capitalization correctly, and you can run them right on your computer. Using these templates is the closest thing to recording a captain’s logbook: it just works.

The problem ? They are both a bit complicated to set up. It’s there Practical This is a very simple and completely free application that can configure either of these models on your computer and give you a keyboard shortcut to use it. It was created by CJ Pais after breaking his finger, rendering him unable to type. He wanted a completely free and radically simple way to use existing AI text-to-speech tools.

To start simply Download Handy-versions are offered for Windows, macOS and Linux. Run the app and you will be asked which template you want to use.

Courtesy of Justin Pot