Voice memos made me a better speaker

👋

I've always struggled with speaking aloud to myself.

Speaking to someone else isn't really a problem, but speaking aloud when I'm alone just feels wrong to me somehow.

I remember a situation a few years ago at work where I needed to record a voice-over for a 30 second demo video. It was so uncomfortable for me that it took me all day to record it.

About a year ago I implemented a little script that transcribes audio files using OpenAI's Whisper and I used it transcribe voice memos I could record in Obsidian.

Apart from being a fun experiment, the goal was to allow me to take some notes about how my day went while I walked the dog in the evening - speaking would be a lot faster and easier than typing.

It was definitely very uncomfortable at the beginning, but it got easier the more I did it.

I now use it for all kinds of things - a year later I have 800+ voice memos recorded with over 123k words spoken 😮

All that practice helped me get more comfortable speaking, better structuring my thoughts as I speak, and even speaking more clearly. So this is something I'll definitely keep doing going forward.

See you tomorrow 👋