My Proven Process to Write with AI and Still Keep My Voice

It makes me more productive and it's fun. (It even improves my fitness!)

Everyone's talking about writing with AI. Some see it as the laziest path to internet fame. Others won't touch it with a ten-foot pole.

If you are worried, you’re right. “With great power comes great responsibility”

You absolutely can lose your authenticity when you use AI to write. But it depends on how you write it.

I’m an avid student and a techno-enthusiast. I want to learn how AI can help me. But I definitely don't want to take the lazy approach. I want it to amplify me.

That's why I spent the last few months developing a workflow that lets me write WITH AI — not one where AI writes FOR me.

In this article, you’ll learn everything about it.

If you're looking for copy-and-paste mega prompts, you're in the wrong place. My process helps me save time and explore ideas more deeply, but it still takes work. You can't create good content without putting in the effort.

Let’s dive in.

My writing starts with… talking

If you walked around my town at odd times during the day, you’d probably cross a lunatic excitedly speaking into the mic of his corded earbuds. If you eavesdropped, you’d discover he’s neither calling a friend, nor recording a voice message. He’s explaining.

That lunatic is me.

I’ve been trying dictation software for years. First, because I wanted to limit screen time and sitting. Then, because I have so many ideas. I want to write whenever possible, even while walking or driving.

Until AI transcription arrived, things were clunky. I had to dictate all punctuation and line breaks. The transcription quality wasn't great, either.

Now, any AI-based dictation software provides almost perfect transcription. It also adds punctuation and separates the paragraphs automatically.

So, I now use dictation every day for writing. It helps me at different steps in my process. Let’s see them in detail.

Idea exploration

If you want to stand out (and most importantly, if you don’t want to waste your reader’s time) you can’t share the same old tips and insights. You need to develop deeper, more unique, more helpful ideas.

To do this, I allow myself time to explore an idea before writing the article. This way, I surface implicit knowledge, lay down every detail, discover new angles. Or even understand that the idea is not as valuable after all.

A conversation is the perfect vehicle for this exploration. But since I am a solopreneur, and most of the time I’m literally “solo”, I talk with AI. (This may sound depressing, but hey, you just have to do what you do!)

So, this is my idea exploration process:

• I go have a walk outside,

• I open the VoiceNotes app and start recording

• I speak freely about my idea, as if I was talking with someone that needs my help.

VoiceNotes on Android

I usually do it in my native language, Italian. The goal is to extract everything I know, every opinion about the idea, I don’t want to be slowed down by a language I don’t know perfectly.

When I press stop, the recording is uploaded and transcribed. It’s ready for the next step.

Outlining

Sometimes, I need more than one exploration session. Or some ideas get discarded.

But when I have enough notes to create an article, it’s time to extract an outline from my ramblings.

This is something AI excels at.

VoiceNotes allows you to directly create from your notes. It provides a few ready-to-use prompts and you can insert your own prompts. But I prefer ChatGPT for this step. In VoiceNotes, you can’t go back and forth with your prompts to improve the outline.

I know you are wondering: what prompt do you use?

Copying and pasting prompts isn’t much helpful. You get the best results by:

• starting with your own prompt,

• then chatting with the AI to refine the results,

• improve the initial prompt based on the chat for the next time.

But I won’t be so annoying! 😉

I don’t have a fixed prompt to create the outline, but usually I start from something sounding like this:

Create an article outline from the reflection below. Use bullet points. Divide it into sections and subsections. Reorganize content to follow a logical flow, if necessary. Avoid repetitions.

This is not perfect. However, I wouldn't expect a real writer to accept an AI-generated outline without revisions. (Assuming I can call myself a real writer, of course 🤔)

Usually, I end up rearranging some bullets, removing some duplicates, and adding a few details. Reading the outline inspires new additions.

But this is not a long process. Within 15 minutes, I’m done.

Drafting while moving

Once I have the outline, it's time to actually "write" the draft. The double quotes are intentional because I don't actually write. I again go out for a walk and dictate using VoiceNotes.

But don’t worry. I don’t have to walk for hours in the same idea. The exploration and the drafting happen on different days. I like to let ideas time to marinate.

I keep my outlines in Notion. So, I open the Notion app and glance at it while dictating.

This time I dictate in English. I tried doing it in Italian for several articles and let AI translate. Unfortunately, the translation sounded too much like Google Translate…

I may have refined the prompt, or gone through an additional editing step. But I enjoy practicing my spoken English. And I feel this way the result is closer to my voice.

(I’m a bit afraid of what a passerby could think of hearing me talk in a foreign language during my walks. But I can just stop talking until he’s at a safe distance. 😳)

Again, when I’m done, I press stop. The article is uploaded and transcribed. It’s ready for editing.

Co-editing with the robots

VoiceNotes’ transcriptions are very good. But my English isn’t perfect.

So, the first editing step consists of:

• copying the text from VoiceNotes,

• pasting it into ChatGPT (or Claude),

• adding this prompt:

Rewrite this to make it sound like it was written by a native English American speaker. Keep all the content. Don't summarize, don't remove details. Don't change the tone of voice. This is a blog post, so keep sentences short, without subordinates when possible. Use short paragraphs of 1-3 sentences.

This step removes mistakes and “weird-sounding” sentences. It enriches the vocabulary a bit, but my voice is preserved.

Now starts a more traditional editing phase. But I like to augment it with AI.

I love Canvas, ChatGPT’s tool. It shows the usual chat interface and the text I’m editing side by side. I can change the text, like in any traditional editor.

ChatGPT Canvas: a good reason to upgrade

But I can also:

• prompt the AI in the usual way,

• highlight parts of the text and send a prompt related to them,

• ask the AI to add comments on the text, without modifying it, like a human editor!

This usually gives me good results. But I always edit the article afterward. I'll find things I want to add or fix parts of the rewrite I don't like.

To me, this feels like editing side by side with the AI. And I love it!

It’s productive, but also creative. I hope I’m not deluding myself, but I feel it increases my creativity, it doesn’t replace. I have immediate feedback that otherwise I wouldn’t get. It provides food for thought. I use my judgement to evaluate what to do with it.

Another bonus of ChatGPT is its memory. Sometimes, it spontaneously saves something about you, like your usual topics, or styling preferences. But you can explicitly ask it to remember something. For example “always start bullet points in lower case”. Over time, ChatGPT’s suggestions get more and more right for your voice.

This isn’t free

A note on paid versus free. At the time of writing, this is definitely a paid workflow.

VoiceNotes yearly plan costs $50. It’s not much, but the free version just isn’t enough.

ChatGPT’s free plan only includes very limited uses of canvas and the better models.

If you have a tight budget, pay only for ChatGPT. You can dictate directly into its app. Or you can record an audio file and upload it (I don’t know the size limits in this case, though).

It works

I've used this process for months. It has never produced an article that doesn't sound like me. It hasn't lost important details from my dictation or hallucinated facts.

On the rare occasion when the first rewrite removed a story or a minor detail I wanted to include, I asked something like “here I talked about X, please add it back”, or “you removed X, please rewrite and stay closer to the original".

One additional benefit is that AI becomes my teacher, like good editors do. I try to remember the useful corrections and suggestions, to incorporate them in my drafts.v

Using AI to write can increase your productivity and creativity. It can improve your writing skills. And if you follow this process, it doesn’t kill your voice.

Give this process a try. At least try dictation. Let me know how it goes!

How do you use AI in your writing? Let me now in the comments!

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