Comment by Void_
17 hours ago
I have mixed thoughts about audio journaling.
At first I was in love - I made an app around Whisper transcription model the weekend it came out. (Still working on it - https://whispermemos.com)
But when I try to read those recordings, they seem long and uninteresting.
I think the slowness of writing forces us to transform the thoughts/ideas into a format that has more substance.
So typing creates better distilled version of the text, and writing with one even more.
Recording audio just makes a raw stream of consciousness.
The process isn’t as therapeutic. It’s like stuffing food in your face instead of slowly chewing.
What are your thoughts on this?
Interesting. WhisperMemos user here.
I used audio journaling before Whisper came out, and I did have a pipeline that would run a transcription through Google Cloud and save the transcript to Evernote. I didn’t actually review the transcripts most of the time, but the very fact of developing my thoughts—without being constrained by typing speed—was very helpful.
What I also liked about this system was that it gave me independence of place: I didn’t have to sit down at a computer. Instead, I could be thinking aloud while driving a car, or while taking a walk in the countryside. Usually, after finishing such a conversation with myself, I would automatically feel much more clarity about the upcoming day, or about whatever issue that had been on my mind.
If I were to add AI to this process, I would perhaps only have the AI extract some bullet point summaries for the topics that were covered, and anything that could be considered a potential to-do item—so that as output you would get these high-level summaries, along with the raw transcript.
If you wanted to, you could also color-code for each summary item the parts of the raw transcript in which these are covered. So, if you ever do look at the summary-slash-transcript, you can always quickly look up what your thoughts were on the subject—though I would guess this would not happen often.
And the most value from that would probably be that your future self, say 10 or 20 or 50 years from now, will be able to dive into what went through your head at this point in time. For the immediate present, the most value probably just comes from taking the mess that is in your head of unfinished thoughts and serializing it into coherent speech—until you feel everything that’s on your mind has been said.
I have wanted to record parts of my stream of consciousness so I can put more time into it later - but that will require me to block out time to do that. I hope I'll have it some day.