Dictation can dramatically improve the quality of your AI prompts while saving time and mental energy. By speaking instead of typing, you’ll naturally create richer, more detailed instructions that give AI models the context they need to deliver better results. This guide shows you how to make dictation a core part of your AI workflow.
Why Prompt Specificity Matters
One of the most important factors in getting good results from any AI model — whether for general tasks or coding assignments — is providing specific, detailed instructions. The AI agent needs complete context and clear requirements to deliver what you expect.
The challenge is that writing comprehensive prompts is tedious and time-consuming. We often take shortcuts, leaving out details that seem obvious to us but are critical for the AI to understand the task fully.
The Dictation Advantage
Dictation solves this problem in three key ways:
Speed and ease — Speaking is faster and requires less cognitive effort than typing. You can generate text at the speed of thought.
Natural flow — When you speak instead of type, you skip the translation step from thought to keyboard. This creates more intuitive, flowing communication.
Reduced self-censoring — Dictation encourages you to get all the information out without over-optimizing or seeking perfection. You’ll include more details, context, and nuance — exactly what AI models need.
This makes dictation not just a productivity tool, but a qualitatively better way to communicate with AI systems.
Choosing the Right Dictation Tool
Your computer’s built-in dictation (like macOS dictation) likely won’t be good enough. These systems optimize for near-real-time transcription and often produce inferior results.
Instead, invest in modern dictation software built on advanced speech recognition models:
Monologue — A new tool gaining popularity with excellent accuracy
WhisperFlow — Popular and reliable option
SuperWhisper — Well-regarded by many users
MacWhisper — Run dictation models locally on Mac
Test a few options to find what works best for your environment and workflow.
The Dictation-First Prompting Workflow
Here’s a powerful three-step process for creating detailed, well-structured prompts:
1. Dictate Stream-of-Consciousness
Don’t worry about organization or polish. Just speak everything on your mind about the task:
All requirements and specifications
Context and background information
Edge cases and special considerations
Examples and counter-examples
Any details that might be relevant
It’s perfectly fine to:
Correct yourself while talking
Remember something later and add it out of order
Repeat yourself for emphasis
Ramble a bit to explore the problem space
The goal is to capture everything, not to create a perfect document.
2. Restructure with AI
You’ll now have long, potentially confusing text — but it’s rich with information. Use an AI model to transform this raw dictation into an organized, clear prompt.
The Promptify Technique
The Promptify prompt is designed specifically for this purpose. Here’s the complete prompt:
<input>
{clipboard}
</input>
You are an expert prompt engineer. Your task is to rewrite the user’s request in <input /> as a detailed and precise prompt for an AI model.
1. Read <input /> carefully and make sure you understand the user’s request in its entirety and with full context and details.
2. Plan carefully how to rewrite the request as a detailed and precise prompt for an AI model. Consider what specific information, instructions, or context the AI model would need to fulfill the user’s request effectively.
3. Rewrite the user’s request as a detailed and precise prompt for an AI model, ensuring clarity, specificity, and completeness. The prompt should guide the AI model to produce the desired output without ambiguity.
- Use clear and specific language. Think of this as language as specification / code, not natural language.
- Use headings (##, ###, ####) where appropriate. No need for a first-level title or heading, only for sections (and only where it’s called for).
- Use **bold**, _italics_, bullet points ( `-`, not `*` ), and numbered lists ( 1. , 2. ) liberally to organize the prompt effectively. Never use emojis.
- Always start with a single short paragraph summarising and describing the overall task.
- The resulting prompt should be concise and specific, avoiding unnecessary complexity or verbosity. It should be at most 1.5X the length of the original request in <input />, and at least 0.75X of the length of the original request in <input />.
- Use plain, straightforward, precise language without embellishments, niceties, or creative flourishes.
- Do not add or invent any information that is not present in <input />.
- Output the final prompt only, as markdown, without any additional commentary or explanation.
How to use it:
Copy your dictated text to your clipboard
Paste the Promptify prompt into your AI chat interface
Replace
{clipboard}with your dictated textThe AI will transform your rambling dictation into a well-structured, clear prompt
The Promptify prompt is carefully designed to:
Preserve all your information without adding or inventing details
Organize content with appropriate headings and formatting
Use precise, specification-like language
Maintain appropriate length (0.75X to 1.5X of the original)
Output clean markdown without unnecessary commentary
You can adapt this prompt to your specific needs or use it as-is. The key insight is that AI can be excellent at restructuring and organizing information while preserving the rich detail you captured through dictation.
3. Review and Refine
Edit the restructured prompt to:
Verify accuracy and completeness
Add any missing details
Remove redundancies
Adjust tone and emphasis
Fine-tune specifications
This final editing step is much easier than writing the entire prompt from scratch, and you end up with a richer, more detailed result than you would have created by typing.
Making Dictation a Habit
Dictation works anywhere you type text. Start incorporating it into your daily workflow:
Draft emails and messages
Create documentation
Write code comments and commit messages
Capture meeting notes and action items
And, of course, create AI prompts
The more you use dictation, the more natural it becomes. You’ll develop a rhythm and style that works for you, and you’ll find yourself generating higher-quality content with less effort.
The Bottom Line
Detailed, specific prompts produce better AI results. Dictation makes it easier to create those prompts by removing the friction of typing and encouraging natural, comprehensive communication. Combined with AI-powered restructuring using techniques like Promptify, dictation becomes a superpower that elevates your entire AI workflow.
Start with one of the recommended tools, try the stream-of-consciousness approach on your next complex prompt, and see how much richer your instructions become.