Dream Time

Keywords: siri, speech-to-text, shortcuts, notes, dream journal, uninterrupted thought, spontaneous reflection, iphone, ios, python, pythonista, hack, personal tool

Logline: An application that allows you to start speech transcription at a moment's notice, with a simple voice command.

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Project Description: This past spring, my friend and I were brainstorming fun projects to collaborate on and had a vision for a software system that would allow you to translate descriptions from your dream journal into livable dreamworlds in virtual reality. As the first part of this process, I considered tools for dream journaling. A challenge that I had experienced a lot myself and heard about frequently from friends was how quickly dreams are often forgotten upon waking. I was curious how the process of recording dreams could be made more seamless to minimize this forgetting.

The solution I came up with was to be able to say a voice command to trigger your phone to start recording your verbal description of your dream. The recording would then be translated into text and stored in a notes app. This would solve the problem of having to find your dream journal and pen or turn on a light in the middle of the night in order to capture what you can remember of a dream as fast as possible before it fades from memory.

To implement this concretely:

• I created a custom visual script in the Apple Shortcuts app.
• Upon the user saying “Siri, Dream Time,” the shortcut runs a script from the Pythonista app that starts recording the user’s description of their dream and converts it to text after a set amount of time.
• This is copied to the clipboard, and the shortcut then saves this text to a file in the user’s Notes app.

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Reflection: It was exciting learning how complex Shortcuts can be made when they are directed to custom code. I was pleasantly surprised to come across Pythonista in my research, which enabled me to use a familiar coding language to interact with native iOS features and run speech recognition.

Although I created this shortcut with a very specific application in mind (dream journaling), I realized it could come in handy in other contexts too. There are many times when spontaneous thoughts or insights come to mind while someone is engaged with another task such as driving, or otherwise unlikely to open up their phone or notebook to write their ideas down. Being able to start speech transcription at a moment’s notice, with a simple voice command, could be very helpful to preserve the full contours and rawness of a thought with minimal filtering or interference.

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