whisper-writer VS playlist-gpt

I've also made six small apps completely coded by ChatGPT (with GitHub Copilot contributing a bit as well). Here are the two largest:

PlaylistGPT (https://github.com/savbell/playlist-gpt): A fun little web app that allows you to ask questions about your Spotify playlists and receive answers from Python code generated by OpenAI's models. I even added a feature where if the code written by GPT runs into errors, it can send the code and the error back to the model and ask it to fix it. It actually can debug itself quite often! One of the most impressive things for me was how it was able to model the UI after the Spotify app with little more than me asking it to do exactly that.

WhisperWriter (https://github.com/savbell/whisper-writer): A small speech-to-text app that uses OpenAI's Whisper API to auto-transcribe recordings from a user's microphone. It waits for a keyboard shortcut to be pressed, then records from the user's microphone until it detects a pause in their speech, and then types out the Whisper transcription to the active window. It only took me two hours to get a working prototype up and running, with additions such as graphic indicators taking a few more hours to implement.

I created the first for fun and the second to help me overcome a disability that impacts my ability to use a keyboard. I now use WhisperWriter literally every day (I'm even typing part of this comment with it), and I used it to prompt ChatGPT to write the code for a few additional personal projects that improve my quality-of-life in small ways. If people are interested, I may write up more about the prompting and pair programming process, since I definitely learned a lot as I worked through these, including some similar lessons to the article!

Personally, I am super excited about the possibilities these AI technologies open up for people like me, who may be facing small challenges that could be easily solved with a tiny app written in a few hours tailored specifically to their problem. I had been struggling to use my desktop computer because the Windows Dictation tool was very broken for me, but now I feel like I can use it to my full capacity again because I can type with WhisperWriter. Coding now takes a minimal amount of keyboard use thanks to these AI coding assistants -- and I am super grateful for that!

I have a disability that makes it painful to type on a keyboard. As a software engineer, this has a considerable impact on my daily life. I've tried using the built-in Windows dictation tools, but they are very buggy and extremely frustrating to use. I was actually getting pretty close to quitting tech as a whole because of all the difficulties I would run into when trying to code. But I recently started playing around with AI coding assistants – and they've been a complete game-changer for me.

Last month, I made a small web app for fun, entirely coded by GPT (<https://github.com/savbell/playlist-gpt>). Since AI wrote most of the code, it required minimal keyboard use on my end – but I still needed to type up the prompts, which was causing me significant pain. I'd heard about OpenAI recently releasing a speech recognition model called Whisper, but nobody had written a dictation app using it yet. So I decided to continue to test out GPT's programming abilities and used it to write my own speech-to-text app that now vastly outperforms the built-in Windows ones! (At least, for my specific use cases.) I now use WhisperWriter every day for almost anything that I need to type, such as prompting ChatGPT – and even writing out this post!

The process:

I've also made six small apps completely coded by ChatGPT (with GitHub Copilot contributing a bit as well). Here are the two largest:

PlaylistGPT (https://github.com/savbell/playlist-gpt): A fun little web app that allows you to ask questions about your Spotify playlists and receive answers from Python code generated by OpenAI's models. I even added a feature where if the code written by GPT runs into errors, it can send the code and the error back to the model and ask it to fix it. It actually can debug itself quite often! One of the most impressive things for me was how it was able to model the UI after the Spotify app with little more than me asking it to do exactly that.

WhisperWriter (https://github.com/savbell/whisper-writer): A small speech-to-text app that uses OpenAI's Whisper API to auto-transcribe recordings from a user's microphone. It waits for a keyboard shortcut to be pressed, then records from the user's microphone until it detects a pause in their speech, and then types out the Whisper transcription to the active window. It only took me two hours to get a working prototype up and running, with additions such as graphic indicators taking a few more hours to implement.

I created the first for fun and the second to help me overcome a disability that impacts my ability to use a keyboard. I now use WhisperWriter literally every day (I'm even typing part of this comment with it), and I used it to prompt ChatGPT to write the code for a few additional personal projects that improve my quality-of-life in small ways. If people are interested, I may write up more about the prompting and pair programming process, since I definitely learned a lot as I worked through these, including some similar lessons to the article!

Personally, I am super excited about the possibilities these AI technologies open up for people like me, who may be facing small challenges that could be easily solved with a tiny app written in a few hours tailored specifically to their problem. I had been struggling to use my desktop computer because the Windows Dictation tool was very broken for me, but now I feel like I can use it to my full capacity again because I can type with WhisperWriter. Coding now takes a minimal amount of keyboard use thanks to these AI coding assistants -- and I am super grateful for that!