This week's tip of the week is Handy.
I started using Handy recently, and it's quickly become one of the apps I use every day. Before Handy, I was using macOS's built in dictation. It wasn't bad, but Handy has been noticeably more accurate thanks to its offline speech-to-text models like Whisper and Parakeet. After a few days, I stopped reaching for the built in dictation altogether.
I've mostly been using it for two things. The first is blogging. It's often easier to explain an idea than type it. I'll dictate a rough draft, then go back and clean it up later. The second is talking to AI coding agents. Instead of typing long prompts, I just press a shortcut, explain what I want, and press it again when I'm done.
Because Handy works at the operating system level, it doesn't matter whether I'm talking to Claude Code, ChatGPT, Goose, GitHub Copilot, or writing in VS Code, Slack, GitHub, Notion, or my browser. If I can type there, I can dictate there.
Another thing I appreciate is that everything runs locally. Your audio stays on your machine, which makes it much easier to use with work projects than cloud-based dictation services. It also supports models for languages other than English.
Handy list of text to speech models
Installing it is straightforward. You can download the app or use one of the following:
# macOS
brew install --cask handy
# Windows
winget install cjpais.HandyLinux users can download the latest release from the project page. There are a few distro and desktop environment specific notes in the README, so I'd recommend following the official installation instructions.
I still use a keyboard for writing code, but for blog posts, documentation, AI prompts, GitHub issues, and Slack messages, I've found myself reaching for Handy more and more.
That's it! Short and sweet. Until the next one!
