ChatGPT - Your New Secretary
How to use ChatGPT to take dictation and proofread it for you.
ChatGPT – Your Private Secretary
I’ve always liked it when someone would say in the movies, “Jane, take a letter.” The secretary would take shorthand at lightning speed. A few minutes later, she would come back with a letter to sign, polished, grammar, spelling, and punctuation corrected.
Sometimes, it would be an author talking into a Dictaphone or tape recorder (they were old movies). They would give the tape to a courier and send it off to someone who would transcribe the tape.
At first, I thought speech recognition software might do that for me. And it certainly comes close. I am always responding to Facebook posts, replying to emails, and texting using voice recognition on my smartphone.
However, speech recognition software often misunderstands what you said, and it can’t interpret what you wanted to say from the context. At best it is 95-98% accurate. That’s missing two to five words per 100. That’s 20-50 words in a 1000-word blog post. Not to mention the fact that you have to get the punctuation precise by adding it verbally.
Well, if you have ChatGPTPlus, you have a private secretary ready to take dictation, proofread, and even polish your prose a bit.
There is a great deal of debate about the use of generative AI, specifically large language models like ChatGPT for journalistic or literary projects. I’m not going to get into that debate here. My personal belief is that the only writing jobs that will be lost to AI are those requiring little skill and less talent. But that’s a subject for another time.
While I definitely do not believe any serious writing can at this point in time be done by generative AI, programs like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and Gemini can provide assistance to writers. Being a virtual secretary is one way to do that.
Using ChatGPT as a Dictation Service
The best way to use ChatGPT for dictation is to start by downloading the mobile app. It’s available for both iOS and Android. However, you need to be careful. There are many apps made to look like Chat. Only download the app by OpenAI.
It is also a plus, if you get the premium service. It’s only $20 a month and provides you not only with text-generation, but also with the ability to upload large volumes of text, audio, and video files. In addition, you can use DALL-E, image generation software, from within the Chat application. It is also faster and more accurate. However, if is not necessary.
Setting up Chat to take dictation involves the use of a prompt. The prompt is the instruction you give to the program. You don’t need code or special language to access the program. In fact, it actually works better if you talk to it just like a human being. It was trained on trillions of pages of human language. So, it responds best to natural language.
When you open the program, click in the chat box. Your keyboard will appear on the screen. You probably have a microphone icon in the keyboard. Click it, that activates your phone’s microphone. You can also click the microphone icon inside of the ChatGPT window.
After that you just begin to speak. You are going to create your prompt. I use something like this: Chat, I am going to enter some text below. I want you to take what I enter and polish it. I want you to maintain my wording as much as possible but correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Additionally, provide me with an analysis of what I wrote along with suggestions for improvement. The text begins next…”
Then just dictate. When you are finished just hit the submit button. It will be “printed” out, proofread and critiqued. Review it for any errors it might have missed or places where it may have changed your text in ways that don’t sound like you.
If you want to let Chat be more aggressive with its editing like a developmental editor might be, instead of asking for suggestions include in the prompt something like this.
“Maintain most of my wording however, polish the prose to improve clarity and style. Match my voice in your edit. The tone should be _____. Do not rewrite entirely, just polish it a bit.”
Keep what you like and reject the rest.
So, if, like me, you dreamed of having a personal secretary take dictation, ChatGPT is ready. Unfortunately, it won’t get your coffee.