How to get super amazing at AI prompting in a few minutes

The secret is to speak up

So you might have realized or read somewhere that getting good at AI is partially about getting good at prompting in AI. Prompting is really like, what do you write to the AI and how do you describe what needs to be done?

You have to imagine that an AI has no real context about you, who you are, what you’re doing, what you’re trying to achieve. And so being very specific about it and being very elaborate about it will help it get stuff done.

So there’s a million and one tutorials, and I guess this is one of them on how to prompt really, really well. People write down all sorts of crazy scripts. I find them all very long and tedious to use, and I actually have a much better strategy to make your prompting ten to a hundred times better and ultimately get better AI results. And here is the secret:

Use your voice

When we are writing text, typing on our keyboard or phone, we tend to edit ourselves. As in, we try to be very terse, we try to be very short because typing is a high-effort thing. You need to find every single letter on the keyboard, write a word, edit it. And so you tend to be much shorter than you would be if you were to just talk.

And so that’s the secret. Instead of typing things out, start using your voice. Start speaking to the AI as if you were speaking to a human who you were describing what to do.

And to be able to do this effectively, there’s now luckily a lot of different apps that can help transform your speech into text.

In fact, this very blog post I am just narrating. I’m not even editing myself. I’m literally just talking to the microphone, pressing a button in it. And to be able to do this effectively, there’s now luckily a lot of different apps that can help transform your speech into text. In fact, this very blog post I am just narrating. I’m not even editing myself. I’m literally just talking to the microphone, pressing a button and the text appears magically on the screen.

My favorite app for this is Aqua Voice, but there are many others like Superwhisper.

I have mapped the key F11 on my keyboard to Aqua Voice. So I just press that key, start talking, and when I press it again, it pastes the text that I just narrated.

Effectively talking to an AI

Now that you’ve set up, all you have to do is just speak at length to an AI and not edit yourself.

So if you make a mistake, you just keep talking, just like you would do to a normal person. You don’t make any changes because really any additional context that you give to the AI, the better it is, but also it can totally handle you correcting yourself.

And this prevents you from redoing your narration, and in turn, that makes sure that you don’t end up again editing yourself. Because if you’re telling something for the second time, you tend to again edit yourself, make things shorter, make them more terse, but really you want to give the AI as much as possible to work with.

And so set up one of these apps or use your phone, for example, that might have this built in, and just start talking and talking and talking. Just explain everything you want it to do, add details, add quirks. Be yourself. Act as if you were talking to a very junior colleague who you’re trying to get something to do without you having to interfere halfway through. And that’s it. Throw that to the AI and see what comes out. I’m sure you’ll find your results are better than ever before.