(2025-03-20) Webb Diane I Wrote A Lecture By Talking About It

Matt Webb: Diane, I wrote a lecture by talking about it. Diane, it’s Thursday and I’ve been figuring out how transcription fits into my everyday work. I had to make up a character to make it make sense, as I’ll say.

My lecture for next Monday has been… up in the air. I’ve been indecisive because the topic will prime how the students approach the brief for the week, so I want to get it right.
Clarity came (as always) during a run.

So, between picking up coffee and getting home, I roughed out the lecture outline.
It’s neat to talk into my Apple Watch using Whisper Memos

Then, when I got home, I said to Claude:
I’m writing a talk. please take this raw transcript and structure it into a high-level outline so I can work on it. do not add any of your own material, just structure my verbal notes.
And pasted in my transcript from the email.

this is not new!

BUT: it’s not a very reproducible workflow, you know?
See, I’m not always writing a talk.

The solution is to embed the instructions at the same time I’m talking to my watch.

Like, I want to be able to say at the end of my rambling about the lecture structure: hey uh take all of that and turn it into um a structured outline – but I can’t.

It’s the usual out-of-band problem: how do you include data and also data processing instructions on the same channel?

I thought about using an explicit delimiter. For instance the genius Cursorless voice interface uses a tongue click to fluidly enter command mode so you can easily multiplex speech and coding.

My generic prompt to Claude, used every time, is now:
you are Diane, my secretary. please take this raw verbal transcript and clean it up. do not add any of your own material

I now finish by saying:
ok Diane I think that’s it. it’s a talk, so please structure all of that into a high level outline so I can work on it. thanks.

And I can mix in instructions like: oh Diane I meant to include that point in the last section. Please move it.

Why Diane? Because I grew up watching Twin Peaks and FBI agent Dale Cooper spends much of the series talking into his pocket tape recorder:

I guess we’ll all be transcribing (lifeblogging) 24/7 one day. I can see already that it’s handy to be able to speak magic commands in regular chatter, to be executed at transcription time in the future.