Today we are discussing about Voice Productivity. the ProductivityCast team explains how to use Voice on our devices and technology to be more effective and productive. We have in the past We discussed voice assistants in episode 071 (Personal Outsourcing) and episode 086 (IoT Productivity).
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In this Cast | Voice Productivity
Ray Sidney-Smith
Augusto Pinaud
Art Gelwicks
Francis Wade
Show Notes | Voice Productivity
Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.
Brain.fm
Coffitivity
Gboard (Gboard on iOS)
Google Voice
Why time passage is longer or shorter at different ages
Reminders Pro
Narro
Active Words 4
Raw Text Transcript | Voice Productivity
Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).
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Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.
Francis Wade 0:26I'm Francis Wade.
Art Gelwicks 0:27 And I'm Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26
Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode. Today, we are going to be talking about voice productivity. And before the show started, we were talking about other things. And Arthur C. Clarke came up and I thought it was really interesting. So I'm going to start us off with this, which is Arthur C. Clarke is the British science fiction author. And he had these three laws that he talked about, of course, it's third laws, most known but I thought it was interesting for us to start off with kind of the other two, which is the first law of Clarke is that when a distinguished but elderly scientists, states that something is possible. He's almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Number two is the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible, great for a science science fiction writer. Hmm. And then his third law, which is his most well known law, and the one that I want us to kind of kick off from is any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. It really conjured up something really interesting about voice productivity, which is that just a few 100 years, there are people who would have you know, kind of been burned at the stake as as sorcerers and witches and whatnot for some of the things that we can now do without ever physically touching anything. And it's just remarkable that voice productivity has taken us there, we have this ability to use audio, both for input and output to be more productive. And I just I find it very fascinating. And I'm looking forward to this discussion. Now, in episodes 71. We discussed a little bit about this in the personal outsourcing episode. So if you haven't listened to that episode, head over jet ProductivityCast dotnet forward slash 071, you'll be able to listen to the personal outsourcing episode, we also actually touched a little bit on this in the IoT productivity episode, which was Episode 86. So if you go to productivity cast dotnet, forward slash 086, you'll be also capable of listening back to that episode. So feel free to listen to those episodes in tandem with this, because there is some other material there as well. But we were talking about this episode, Augusto and I have talking about it. And, you know, the reality is, is that audio productivity predates and goes well beyond what we know today in terms of voice assistants. But we have so much around audio voice productivity that I wanted to kind of have this discussion. And then Augusto brought up this other really interesting, unique use case of this did you want to tell us a little bit about how that came to be. And then we'll get into the conversation,
Augusto Pinaud 3:01
of course, and this happened to me working with a new client. It's a new client that I'm coaching. And as we were looking into his personal productivity, we got to the keyboard. And when I publish 25 tips for productivity, one of the things that I said is learn to type, you know, typing when you spend your days, in the computer, the keyboard is your bottleneck, and the fastest you can type and the more you know certain things in a computer, the better you can use that computer. So when we test the speed typing speed of this client, it was really, really slow. So I told him, we need to get you a software to learn to type so we can get your speed up. So you can really be more productive at this to what the client answer. I'm not. To my surprise, what do you mean, you know, I'm not learning to type. So we need to find a different way. So we begin looking into the audio way and see if I could get this client to use the audio commands on his devices. So that way instead of typing the emails, he can dictate the emails. And that's how this episode came. Not only that it was really interesting for me, because as much as he's improvement in productivity came almost instantly he went from 2520 to 25 words per minute, to be able to dictate between 100 and 120. Not only that he now for the first time Feel free to do these emails to dictate this and it's really changing productivity in a way that I didn't envision. I my response has always been learn to type. You know, let me give you this tool. Let me teach you and I still think there is an incredible value into learning to type better and to type faster. But I have never considered the difference in the speed of that mostly because I, I personally have a privacy issue when I dictate, you know, everybody can hear everybody. And that doesn't necessarily appeal to me. But I understand that it's not a concern for you. Now you can go and type emails and do these things and really improve your speed and many other things. So I've been looking into this in the last week and a half or two weeks into how can you improve and really change things when we talk about this typing and input typing and everything else.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:40
So what I'd like us to do is to kind of have this conversation in three parts, we're going to talk about what are the ways we know voice and audio productivity can be used, productivity tools and workflows can be used. And then we'll talk a little bit about how we currently use voice or audio productivity technologies in our own productive systems, productivity systems. And then for you listeners, we can kind of close out with ways that you can get started with voice or audio productivity. And if you are already using these tools, then maybe how we would recommend leveling up in that space, what are some of the ways in which you can do more with some of these productivity tools, where you can get input and output by audio, and be more productive with it. So let's get started with what are the ways in which we can currently be productive. Using voice and audio,
Francis Wade 6:38
I don't use a lot of audio. So the little bit that I use, in terms of productivity, is I so I produce a column for the newspapers on the topic of productivity every two weeks. And I've done it for about 10 years or so. And one of the one of the techniques I use is that once I've gotten to almost the final draft, or it's been vetted by my colleague and wife, I actually record it. And the reason I record reason I recorded is not for the recording or didn't start off that way. But it started off as an attempt to even though the bumps in the manuscripts were 100 words. And so every two weeks, I reread over the article I've just written. And what I'm listening for is where the the grammar is a little tricky. The words don't flow, where I'm repeating words anywhere I could make improvements. And I started out doing that just for myself, just listen to how I could improve the text. And then I decided, why not why not recorded just for the heck of it. And then at some point later on, so why not publish it? for the heck of it. So I turned it into a podcast. But the the major, the major productivity improvement is, yes, it's cool to have the podcast. But it's the reading overload and capturing it on video and hearing my voice as I'm reading it, because it helps me to write become a better writer. I did that for my book as well. I read every chapter and then tried to listen to where things weren't making sense or where I was getting into problems. But that's one of the it's this. This is one that's been recommended for years. But it's a bit of it used to be a bit of a pain in the ass to do it's become easier.
Art Gelwicks 8:30
It's interesting, Francis, because I do something that's kind of the exact opposite in process. I use Microsoft Word Online and their dictate function when I'm going to script, a podcast episode,
