# Dictate a Prompt — the workflow

*For people who plan better walking than typing. Five minutes of
talking, structured right, beats an hour of staring at a blank prompt
box.*

## The loop

1. **Open your clarifier first.** If you're starting a project, that's
   the /start questions (or the game clarifier in the Godot pack).
   Dictation works best answering questions, not free-associating —
   the questions are the structure, your voice is just the fast way
   to answer them.
2. **Record on your phone.** One answer per recording, or one long
   recording with a breath between answers — either transcribes fine.
   Speak at conversation pace; punctuation you care about, say out
   loud ("period", "new line") only if you'll paste the text raw —
   for an AI brief, you can skip it: the AI reads run-ons fine.
3. **Transcribe locally** (`setup-on-your-machine.md`). Thirty seconds
   of audio is a few seconds of CPU.
4. **Skim once, fix the names.** The engine's mistakes cluster on the
   words it can't guess from context: your project's name, people's
   names, jargon. Our proof transcript got exactly one content word
   wrong in a paragraph ("bill" heard as "build" — two real words,
   one plausible sentence). Ninety seconds of skimming catches those;
   a dictated brief you never re-read is a brief with typos in the
   load-bearing words.
5. **Paste the transcript where the typing would have gone** — the
   clarifier's answers, the bug report, the acceptance notes. Done.

## When dictation is the wrong tool

- Code, file paths, and exact strings — type those; one wrong
  character is a bug, and speech is bad at characters.
- Anything you wouldn't say out loud where you are. The engine is
  local and private, but your kitchen isn't.
- Final copy. Dictate the draft, edit by hand — the same rule as
  every other first draft.

## The honest summary

Speech-to-text used to be either a per-minute bill or a cloud account.
The free local engines crossed "good enough for briefs" a while ago;
this pack exists so the discovery costs you one install instead of
one more month of typing prompts with your thumbs.