Talk It Out
Using AI as a force multiplier in content development
Note — This post is about process, not content.
Talk to text is a powerful and underutilized tool.
I've been a fan of using talk to text for many years, and even wrote about how I used it during performance summary cycles (PSC) at Facebook in 2016 (see step 4 in the image below).
As I've been building this course, I've found myself with too much to say and not enough clarity on how to say it. Thankfully, we live in 2023 and there are an incredible range of tools to assist in the content development process. The big unlock for me has been recording myself talking through an idea and then using AI summarization to trim down to the core of what I'm trying to say.
This isn't totally new for me and probably not novel for you. In the past, I've used Grain to record myself working through parts of presentations, repeating and iterating on how I want to say certain parts and using highlights to build the ideal presentation.
Over the last few weeks, I've found that walking has helped me think about course content, so I've turned to Otter to record these conversations and then leveraged Otter chat and/or Claude to make sense of them.
This has been a force multiplier on my effort.
My previous experience in overwriting and slimming down often included outlining, drafting, editing, summarizing, another round of editing, and so on. Now, I'll start by outlining the content up until the point that my idea has momentum, then I'll open Otter and start recording. This whole process adds only a few minutes in addition to recording and allows me to focus my energy on communicating the core idea for the course, rather than getting to it.
In doing this, I'm not necessarily taking the exact output of Otter or Claude, but I'm using them as a map to my own ideas. This allows me to zoom in to specific parts, rather than spend a ton of time making the map myself.
If you find yourself swimming in your own ideas, give this a try — Grain, Otter, and Claude are all free.