{"slug": "ramble-on", "title": "Ramble on", "summary": "A writer describes using text-to-speech tools like Monologue to overcome a \"blank canvas problem\" by verbally dumping unstructured thoughts before structuring them with AI. The approach prioritizes speaking over typing to maintain creative flow, despite the user's lingering unease about talking to a computer.", "body_md": "[Ramble on](/ramble-on)\n\nI have a blank canvas problem. I’m way better at staying in flow when I have something to work through, so these days, the first thing I do is ramble.\n\nI open Codex or [Spiral](https://writewithspiral.com/), turn on [Monologue](https://www.monologue.to/) (my preferred text-to-speech tool), and dump everything I can think of on the topic. Before Monologue, I never considered typing speed to be a bottleneck. My fingers move faster than the speed I shape ideas. But when I want to vomit a bunch of unstructured thoughts onto a canvas, they suddenly feel slow and error-prone.\n\nInstead, I can start a task by talking through it to generate a transcript. Then I ask an agent to structure my ramblings (the other day, the agent responded with *“Your brain dump is rich.\"*—probably the nicest compliment I’ve ever gotten from a robot!). This gives me a great starting point to really dig into the problem. Before I know it, I will have rewritten all that rambling into coherent a string of thought.\n\nI still can’t shake the dystopian feeling of talking to my computer. But text-to-speech has made some tasks feel so natural, I almost can’t imagine working without it anymore.\n\n## Information Overload newsletter\n\nI occasionally send out a dispatch with personal stories, things I'm working on, and interesting links I come across.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ramble-on", "canonical_source": "https://sebastiandedeyne.com/ramble-on", "published_at": "2026-05-05 12:00:04+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-26 09:15:53.778919+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-tools", "natural-language-processing", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Codex", "Spiral", "Monologue"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ramble-on", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ramble-on.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ramble-on.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ramble-on.jsonld"}}