Voice Dictation to ChatGPT to Polished Content in 5 Minutes

Last week, I was with a group of entrepreneurs in Chicago as part of the Endeavor organization. One of the topics that naturally came up was ChatGPT, and how we were using it inside our respective startups. After discussing the usual ways we use it, I shared my favorite use case: cleaning up longform text that was originally from me, but putting it through ChatGPT so that it corrects all the grammar, punctuation, and spelling, making it turnkey for publishing. In fact, it’s so powerful and fast that I recommend every entrepreneur do it.

Here’s how to do it. Start by going to your Mac and enabling voice-to-text through the fn shortcut key. To do this, begin with the Apple logo in the upper left, then System Settings, then Keyboard. Enable the fn key to start dictation. Scroll down on that settings screen, and you can turn on voice dictation. Now that you’ve enabled speech-to-text through a simple keyboard shortcut, the next step is to load up your favorite word processing application. In this example, I’m using the native Notes app on Mac and setting it to plain text.

With your word processing application open, it’s pretty straightforward. All you need to do is use the shortcut key to start the voice dictation, and then you can start talking. From a content perspective, my favorite way to create content is to reflect on conversations from the last week or two. These conversations with entrepreneurs are always insightful, and opportunities to learn something new. Quite often, it’s the best source of new information that I want to document and share as part of this blog.

Once you have your long form content through the voice dictation in your notes or word processor, the next step is to copy and paste it into ChatGPT and have it cleaned up for publishing. Now you can go ahead, copy and paste, and instruct ChatGPT with the prompt, “Turn the following content into a blog post.” It will quickly generate a blog post. The challenge we’ve seen with ChatGPT is that it can be verbose and tends to get wordy with adjectives. What I like to do is give it the following prompt: “Clean up the following blog post focusing on grammar, punctuation, and spelling without adding adjectives.“

By using this as the prompt for ChatGPT, followed by the content you copied and pasted from your voice dictation, ChatGPT will immediately respond with all the content cleaned up and ready to go, including paragraphs, punctuation, spelling, and grammar – everything turnkey. Now, once ChatGPT has returned its version of the article, I copy and paste it back into the original app, the Notes app or the word processor app. Then, I go through it and refine it to make it sound more like my voice wherever possible. 

The voice dictation plus ChatGPT polish entire process takes less than five minutes and is the fastest process possible to go from idea to content to polished content to ready to publish. This is one of my favorite use cases of ChatGPT, and I highly recommend it to all entrepreneurs as they build their content and brand.