The Magic Typewriter

How to publish on Medium without typing a word.

Stories are meant to be told. So, I tell mine to my phone, and it very kindly types them for me.

Which would you prefer? Talking to your phone while relaxing in a comfortable chair with a cuppa, or sitting at the computer and typing.

Personally, I prefer talking in comfort. I also find my ideas flow more freely.

The necessary apps are generally referred to as speech-recognition or speech-to-text software.

Such software used to be expensive, though it did have cool names like ‘Dragon Naturally Speaking’.

Now, AI has made such software much more accurate, sophisticated, and simple to use. The necessary apps come with the phone and are completely free.

If I’m dashing off something short, want to make notes of ideas, or do a rough draught outline, I may just use the phone’s note-taking app. It has this nifty little microphone icon on the bar above the keyboard. Just touch and talk. I’m sure you can work it out. As these apps save to the phone, you don’t even need a phone signal or Internet connection. This is great if you’re out of signal range, maybe exploring the great outdoors and journaling your experiences.

Once returned to civilization, you can just copy and paste the notes to a Medium draft and edit as usual.

I find the phone awkward for actually publishing on Medium, so I email my notes to myself. From there I can copy and paste them into a Word document or Medium draft to edit etc.

With longer pieces, I prefer Google Docs over a note-taking app. It also has speech-to-text built-in. This means I am dictating directly online, and my work is saved to the web, accessible from any device with Internet access.

Sadly, Medium does not yet have speech-to-text built-in.

Normally it would never occur to me to write a story about something as simple as using software.

This story was triggered by the excellent article by August Birch describing how we can triple our writing time by typing on our phone to make use of all those idle and boring minutes we spend waiting for traffic, public transport, doctors, dentists, and so on.

If, as August suggests, I wish to write my story in the doctor’s waiting room or the grocery store then obviously dictating is not a good idea, and his process would be more useful.

If, on the other hand, speaking aloud is not a problem, then speech-to-text is an excellent way to get a lot of work done in a very short amount of time.

I haven’t tried doing it hands-free in a car but can’t see any problem if you’re a passenger. May be more challenging for a driver. You might need to activate the microphone by talking to Siri or Google, rather than by touch. I’d suggest checking driving regulations for your jurisdiction before trying it, however, just in case.

Google Docs provides 15 GB of free storage. This would equal many books and thousands of Medium stories.

So, no more laborious typing. Just talk, talk, talk.

Barbara Mac ©2022