Stop Using Your Keyboard and Start Using Handy, a Free Speech-to-Text App

If old sci-fi shows are anything to go by, we’re all using our computers wrong. We’re still typing with our fingers, like cave people, instead of talking out loud the way the future was supposed to be. Have you ever seen Picard touch a keyboard? Of course not.

And it’s odd because our computers are all capable of turning speech into text by default. The problem? It just doesn’t work very well. Or, at least, it didn’t. In recent years AI models like Nvidia’s Parakeet and OpenAI’s Whisper, both open source, have made great strides in turning human voices into text. Both excel at correctly adding things like punctuation and capitalization, and you can run them right on your computer. Using these models is the closest I’ve felt to recording a captain’s log—it just works.

The problem? They’re both a little complicated to set up. That’s where Handy comes in. This is a dead-simple, totally free application that can set up either of these models on your computer and give you a keyboard shortcut to use it. It was created by CJ Pais after he broke his finger, rendering him unable to type. He wanted a totally free, and radically simple, way to use existing AI speech-to-text tools.

To get started simply download Handy—there are versions offered for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Run the application and you’ll be asked which model you want to use.