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In the past couple of decades of human history, I can remember the seminal inventions that shaped our human existence so profoundly that somehow or another, whether we realized it or not, our lives had changed.

Of these inventions, the most immediate that I can point to is Google, the search engine that made it so we could see the entire world. Beyond that, I’d say Facebook, the social media app that connected the world in a strange technological network. 

The next one of these and probably freshest in people’s memories is ChatGPT, the tool that showed us the power and usefulness of generative AI, highlighting for us both the revolution of this new technology and also heightening our fears that one day robots would take over all of us.

Well, I firmly believe that the next one is here, and its name is Wispr Flow.

Download it here! 

But what exactly is Wispr, and why are you asking me to download this? 

Well, I’m glad you asked.

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What is Wispr?

Wispr is an AI transcription software, but it is not just any transcription software.

It’s a transcription software that activates at the touch of a button. 

You can use it in any text field and begin transcribing what you are saying by nothing more than a touch of a button and then speaking into your microphone, which ends up creating transcriptions like this, and even intelligently paragraph what you are saying while at the same time minimizing redundancy by fixing mistakes for you on the fly, based on your writing style, yielding transcriptions like this.

What does it cost?

The software itself is free to use for up to 2,000 words in the course of a single week if you choose to use the Flow Basic plan. 

On the other hand, if you use Flow Pro, which most of you probably will. that’s going to cost $12 a month and it’s going to get you unlimited words and access to a couple of cool features such as:

1. Command Mode: This mode allows you to use ChatGPT in any text field to edit and format text. It also enables you to utilize the AI’s capabilities to generate output and edit text with ease.

2. Perplexity integration: This feature is an additional component of the AI’s capabilities, which can be utilized in conjunction with Command Mode. It can be used to further enhance the output and editing capabilities of the AI.

I will cover these in more posts at a later point. Let’s get into the meat of things and talk about the killer feature here: seamless voice transcription!

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How does it work?

Activating Flow is literally just the touch of a button that results in the entire transcription process beginning, processing, and eventually concluding within no more than a few seconds.

In this small example, I’m just using the Option key as a customized hotkey.

Whenever I want to activate Flow, I press the Option button twice, and then begin speaking on my computer, then this guy pops out.

Immediately, within just a couple of seconds, an entirely formatted paragraph comes out.

Pretty cool, isn’t it?

But doesn’t ChatGPT allow you to do the same thing?

Some of you might very well say, doesn’t ChatGPT allow you to do the exact same thing anyway? 

Moreover, isn’t it true that you also don’t have to pay?

You’re absolutely right. You can definitely do Whisper transcription inside ChatGPT just by tapping the little button to the right of your text box in the ChatGPT app. 

It’s very quick, very efficient, and it allows you to capitalize on the massive speed advantages that voice typing allows you to obtain.

However, it is still slower than Wispr Flow.

Let’s do a bit of a comparison then.

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Wispr Flow vs ChatGPT for Transcriptions

Let’s consider this in terms of what actually needs to happen in order for you to use each of these different transcription methods. And let’s begin with ChatGPT.

ChatGPT voice transcription process

First, consider that you need to actually open ChatGPT in order to begin the transcription process.

This means that you need to switch tabs away from what you were actually doing, access ChatGPT, and then only begin this process, and it means you have to move away from the context to forget what you are saying and to start afresh or new and maybe even rearrange windows so that you can see what you’re looking at in order to begin the process of transcribing.

Here’s a look at ChatGPT being used to transcribe and create a message for sending.

As you can see, there were at least 8 steps in this process to get to the pasting stage and before sending, even though there are 5 images. To summarize…

Here is the ChatGPT process:

1. I had to open up ChatGPT
2. Then I had to push the record button
3. I had to speak
4. I had to copy the output
5. I moved to the next app, WhatsApp.
6. I tapped it.
7. I tapped the text box where I was supposed to send what I wanted to send. 
8. I pasted it.

Compare this to Wispr Flow, where the process is much simpler:

1. I tapped the text box.

2. I tapped a key on my keyboard.

3. I spoke.

4. I saw that the output was complete and also formatted.

What does this mean?

As you can see, ChatGPT takes a minimum of 8 steps in order to get the same message out, while Wispr Flow takes only 4 and it even formats the output so that things such as lists, paragraphs, and other kinds of formatting are taken care of, while ChatGPT will not do that.

Let’s also remember that for Wispr Flow, all transcription takes place within the same context window, so you can refer to everything that was said before as you decide on what you’re going to say.

For ChatGPT, you have to open up multiple devices and then try to decide on what you’re going to say by memory and may very well lose the plot unless you’re constantly referring back to what it is that you are referencing before eventually going back to ChatGPT, whereas if you’re using Wispr Flow, you can just read what you’ve already written in order to decide what it is that you’re going to say next.

Put simply, ChatGPT is great at cutting down on typing time, but it is still much more inefficient compared to Wispr Flow.

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To summarize:

Wispr Flow takes forward the culture of efficient and highly accurate voice transcription that was set forth by OpenAI’s Wispr algorithm and it improves upon it in every way.

It is quick, it is fast and works with the touch of a button, and it is the most seamless transcription experience I have ever had in my entire life; while ChatGPT may have saved a good chunk of time, Wispr Flow can help you save hours upon hours of editing and publishing work more, while at the same time cutting down on the transaction costs that take place whenever you switch between windows.

It cuts away every single bit of the fat and the adjustment processes associated with creating a text and having your voice translate itself into a text into, and that’s not even considering the way that it is constantlyaccurately spacing your words, minimizing edits, and even learning the way that you write so that you can create more efficient transcripts and also articles and publications along the way.

Installing Wispr Flow is simple: just go over to this link, click download on the upper right corner, and you’re on your way to ensuring that you can access one of the most incredible pieces of software in the entire world.

To conclude:

I’ll start off with an admission.

Every single part of this piece has been written with Wispr Flow by me just sitting down and writing everything into this document with nothing more than just a bit of conversation on my part with the device straight away, ensuring that my thoughts can be translated into the document. 

It is deeply incredible and something that I have never imagined being able to do, and I truly believe that Wispr Flow is the service that will create the next vanguard for new interactivity with the computer. 

I don’t think that Wispr Flow is going to entirely kill the keyboard for a variety of reasons. 

Namely, for example, in a modern office environment (though without prejudice to the possibility that other kinds of office environments may evolve in the future where this point is not a concern), people can’t very well be talking to themselves constantly because that’s going to end up disrupting people, as well as the keyboard’s ability to adapt to different typing styles, its advanced macro capabilities, and its compatibility with various keyboard layouts; also, things like gaming and other applications may still recruit the capabilities of the keyboard along the way, and human society may end up adapting brand new technologies that may be more usable with keyboards than just the modality of voice interaction.

Still though…

For me, Wispr Flow is quite possibly the single most efficiency-raising software development that I have ever encountered.

I consider it a godsend for me and for anyone else out there who has carpal tunnel syndrome and faceless difficulty as a result of carpal tunnel and hours spent moving fingers one after another, opening up a route not only for navigating computers and the human-computer interactions that we take part in in a more healthful, ergonomic, and ultimately beneficial way that helps to reduce the strain that we place upon the human body.

A side benefit? 

Wispr Flow and other forms of automated speech recognition (ASR) algorithms have allowed me to constantly practice my ability to articulate my thoughts and ideas in the realm of the spoken word; I consider it valuable for those of us out there who need to make ourselves heard by speaking, interacting, and articulating themselves to audiences — not only of readers but also to those who will eventually end up experiencing our presence in conversations or in auditoriums during the odd moments when we have to give speeches, and I am sure that it will be the same for many people out there as well.

I’d like to reiterate what I said at the start of this piece about seminal inventions. 

These were inventions that were incredible and that fundamentally shaped the way that we existed, interacted, or connected with one another. 

After having written this piece, I am all the more convinced. The ease at which my ideas came out, the speed at which it took place, the lack of focus on the mechanical aspects of what would otherwise be an arduous process predicated upon my manually looking for errors along the way has been transformed into a process that has allowed me to use my mind rather than deal with the intricacies of ensuring the physical accuracy of every single thing along the way. 

In short, the entire paradigm of interaction and creation has for me transformed. 

As I move forward to posting this, I will observe that it was the easiest blog post that I have ever written in my entire life, requiring no more than the 10 mouse clicks to copy, paste, and upload it along the way. 

I truly cannot recall a more transformative technology throughout the course of my life and give my profound congratulations to the Wispr Flow team, including Tanay and also Sahaj, for having brought this incredible piece of work together. You have personally transformed my life, and I am confident that millions of people await this journey of transformation as well. My heartiest congratulations to all of you for this world-shaking achievement, and I look forward to seeing your names further up in lights in the future!

• V.

Every morning I wake up, I ask myself:

How do I be someone valuable to society, and how do I create things that are valuable to society?

Ever since I was a child, I think that this question has been a part of me – the part that wants to create something that’s of my own in service of the world in which I live through imagination, thought, and the machinations of a mind that will not sit still. 

Some may argue that choosing to make a difference is a matter of disposition.

I don’t want to give to society. I want to live for myself!

Why should I care about what other people think?

I consider people entirely able to make such statements and accept that they exist don’t disagree with that – human beings are different and naturally abide in different worlds; bearing different personalities, we approach the world through myriads of different lenses built from different world views, cultural backgrounds, and educational experiences.

In such a world, might someone not argue that becoming societally valuable is merely one of many pathways. Surely that is an overgeneralization? 

Personally, I feel that that is not so, purely because society is a large and far-ranging concept. Rather than an abstract and faraway entity, it is something that is close and begins from those closest and dearest to us before it extends outwards into the world.

Society is fundamentally made up of individuals – our friends, our family members, the people who make up the sum and total matrix of people whom we know and love, and those whom we have yet to know whether near and within our communities, or far away and outside of them.

To bring value to these people and by extension to society is not so grandiose as ending climate change, eliminating inner city crime, or resolving budgetary constraints on a macroeconomic scale, even if those things are desirable – To share laughter that enlightens your spirit is to be societally valuable – to make others cherish you through your words, thoughts, and actions is to bring social value – to create products, ideas, thoughts, and things that inspire others to take action, to make a difference, and to think just a little differently is to bring social value into being and to create something that is meaningful to society. On all levels and in all ways, the barrier of entry to contribute towards society is not so high, and it certainly suffices to play one’s role well as a son or a daughter, a father or a mother or a friend, alongside the numerous other things that a person might choose to do in their careers.

In all likelihood, even if for some unlikely reason we were unsociable and cold or we knew nobody in this world, the ability to create societally valuable things is a key component of survival in the world. Creating things that people value is the key reason as to why people would sacrifice resources for that thing, whether time, energy, or money – it is the reason that people take part in exchanges to mutual benefit, which is impossible to do if one doesn’t discover traits, attributes, or qualities that allow them to be beneficial to the world at large in the social context in which we live, especially in a capitalistic context where survival rests upon the exchange of resources and growing them to meet our ever-increasing set of wants transformed into needs.

There are so many different ways to satisfy the needs of a person in a capitalistic context that command their instincts, willpower, and personal volition together as part of a project of building something that is unique to themselves, yet it is not only in service of capitalistic needs that we create things. 

I think that I could have written this in more relatable language and with a little more engagement, but this is what came out of me today – I’ll write a little more later 🙂 

The journey has been pretty interesting in a whole bunch of different ways.

Amongst other things, I’ve received a partnership with GerakBudaya, and also in conjunction with the American Universities Alumni Association of Malaysia and the National Assembly of Malaysian Students in the United States of America (NAMSA), we are organizing this event.

Here’s the event PDF to showcase that this is quite real.

Honestly, even the term Corporate Pathways is a bit of a misnomer.

I don’t know how corporate this event is going to be, primarily because it’s mainly going to be focused upon experience sharing and how people thought about their lives in the course of GLC in relation to the education that they received while they were in the U.S.

There is a whole backstory to this that goes back about a month or two months or so, but has led me to a place of networking, meeting different people, and establishing friendly chat after friendly chat, rather than transactional moment after transactional moment with a bunch of different people with whom I probably never imagined at the outset that I’d be on casual speaking terms with.

Anyway, here are some of the people who will be on the panel.

GLC Panel:

Nick Khaw, Head of Research at Khazanah and alumnus of Harvard University.

Aik Chong Phuah, previous CEO of Petronas Digital and alumnus of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Brendan Yap, Senior Executive at the Securities Commission and alumnus of NYU.

Athirah Azmi, former Manager, Client Coverage at Maybank Investment Bank and alumna of the University of Chicago 

Private Sector Panel:

Audrey Ooi, co-founder of Colony Coworking Space and an alumna of Mount Holyoke College, also known as @fourfeetnine.

Dato’ Vincent Choo, Founder, Urban Ground Group, Franchisee Subway; alumnus of Eastern Michigan University.

Yen Ping Teh, APAC Product Partnerships at Google and an alumna of Mount Holyoke College.
Brian Soo, Chief Innovation Officer of Firefighter.my and an alumnus of the University of California, San Diego.

It’s been a whole whirlwind of experiences from trying to ensure representation, meeting different alumni clubs, encountering representatives of the different organizations dedicated towards Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, and so on and so forth. All I can say is that it’s been interesting and unique to see what’s been going on develop over the course of time.

Didn’t think that it was going to be possible for me to organize something like this before, but I guess it was… And here I am with just another iteration of the thoughts that I had before.

“Now that we’ve done this, what can we do next?”, goes the thought.

Honestly, I don’t know the answer to that question, but what’s for sure is this:

The universe has placed me in a unique position, I think, to make a difference, to bring people together, and to create new experiences that are valuable and meaningful towards members of our society at large. And so long as I am here, and that universe continues to give me strength, I will endeavor to create better ones, and to level up along the way, so that I can do good to my country, and contribute towards it, rather than constantly complaining, failing to take action, and sitting immured in a prison of my own doubts.

I look forward to seeing this happen, and the interesting developments that lie ahead 🙂

From a very young age, I had always understood businesses as entities that bring value to society in meaningful ways that otherwise it would not receive – and that’s one of the many reasons why the bookstore had always stood out to me as one of the ultimate business forms; after all, what could deliver more value to society than the transmission of knowledge itself for the profit of mankind, far above and in excess the monetary value that is paid for them?

There is a huge camp out there of people who think that knowledge should be free and fairly accessible – I don’t dispute this to be a valuable point of view, but I also consider it to not be tenable; sure, we can say that society is the core issue and that knowledge *should* all be made available to the universe, but the fact remains that creating and obtaining knowledge is a costly effort, and if nothing else, the process of assembling something together whether through study or physical organization is something that manifestly should be rewarded.

A critic might very well say that that’s the capitalist in me speaking and fighting against all the tides of justice, but I believe that life is about managing circumstances, finding spaces in the interstices of ideals and reality where there is a happy balance, and pushing forward in the thrust for existence.

In my ethical system and paradigm, that bookstore is the most moral of the businesses out there – maybe a little strange if you consider that Amazon had started out as an online bookstore perhaps, but that’s what we’re working with here x)

Anyway, I’m very happy to announce that I have a brand new partnership with the online bookstore GerakBudaya, for whom I’ve begun writing reviews – most immediately, a review of Dr. Toh Kin Woon’s “Malaysia’s New Economic Policy In Its First Decade”, casually titled “The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions” (not by me, but by the admin!!!)

It was super fun to reflect on the New Economic Policy, to meet a thinker who had dedicated his academic career to something so crucial to Malaysia’s society, and to become sufficiently capable of understanding as to develop a viewpoint valuable to society.

There are many things that have been happening recently – too many to contain within the margins of this page alone. Can’t wait to see how things will develop in the days ahead 🙂

If there were a flaw that I would observe about myself, I think it would be this. That I am someone who thinks a little too much about what other people think.

What this means sometimes is that I tend to not want to release things because I fear that they won’t be appreciated, people won’t like them, or anything else of that nature.

And granted, that doesn’t happen across everything. If it’s just an Instagram story, for example, I just enjoy releasing dumb, interesting things that reflect the different random things that happen during the course of the day.

But when it comes to more extended creative projects, I think that I am restrained in some ways by feeling that everything needs to be perfect.

Everything needs to somehow just match up with the best. And in some ways, that is kind of negative, because if you were to just try for things that aren’t always good, if you’re a new perfectionist, then what ends up happening is that, sure, you might end up creating a good product, but what will probably happen also is that you’ll just not release anything.

And believe me, that does happen quite a fair bit for me. I am the kind of person who tends to hem to haw, to just kind of let things go by because I think, “Oh, it’s not ready. Oh, I shouldn’t release this. Oh, more needs to be done.”

And that’s just my nature. I tend to be pretty careful with a lot of different things.

But at the same time, I’d like to try to get past that and I think that that can happen in at least two different ways.

One is that I reach a level of ability whereby the things that I do end up matching what I consider to be a nice standard. Maybe that’s a bit of a cop-out because that requires me to get to a certain level whereby pretty much anything I say or do just becomes acceptable as a creative product. It’s not really that sort of change of heart that I was kind of going at along the way earlier, but it’s one possibility, really.

I genuinely believe that people who can produce prodigiously, many of them are at that level partly because I think that that is the level that I would need to be at.

Maybe that’s a limiting belief.

Maybe in reality, the vast majority of the things that people make out there in this world are just not particularly good.

Maybe I’m just a little too self-concerned, conceited, caught up in my own thinking when actually there’s no enemy.

But who knows?

What’s for sure is that there is a sort of limiting belief that has been operating in my life, and I think it’s a good time to let it go – one of the reasons why I’m treating this website sort of as a group therapy session at the moment.

But in the future, I do genuinely hope that somehow or another, a little part of me is going to change. A little part of me is going to transform. A little part of me is just going to develop that skill, that pride, that recognition of something worthwhile to share. Maybe so worthwhile that it doesn’t matter even if I come out imperfect, even if it’s not ready, whatever – Because what matters most is the contribution and not perfection.

Who knows? Anyway, life has been interesting, and I’m kind of looking forward to what’s coming up here and there. So many different things to update, lots of ideas to share along, and a whole range of things I never thought that I would ever experience.

I’m very grateful for what the universe has brought, what it brings, and what it will continue to bring. Let’s just put it there.