Note to self: using the voice-recorder app on your smartphone to dictate a note to self can be a quick and convenient way to shepherd and organise your fleeting thoughts.

The only problem with this practice, as you may have discovered, is that you need to go back and make sense of your rambles, especially when they were spoken on the go.

Happily, there is a solution, and as with many things these days, it comes to us courtesy of the miracle of Artificial Intelligence.

OpenAI, the company that gave the world ChatGPT, is also the brains behind a technology called Whisper, which is capable of turning speech into text with almost uncanny accuracy.

For researchers, journalists, lawyers, students, clinical practitioners, and anyone else who works with the spoken and written word, Whisper-based apps are nothing short of a high-tech miracle.

They turn transcribing from a chore into a joy, automatically eliminating ums and ahs, and coping easily with accents, low-quality audio, and background noise.

What’s more, the apps — such as MacWhisper for Mac and Hello Transcribe for iPhone, with apps for Windows and Android on the way — produce clean, easy-to-read transcripts with properly punctuated sentences and capitalised names and proper nouns.

Even more impressively, Whisper can parley vouz 99 lingos, allowing you to translate spoken text from one language to another in real time. But let’s get back to those messy, rambling notes to self.

One of the most useful of the new generation of AI transcription apps is AudioPen, which takes your random thoughts and transforms them in seconds into coherent, well-structured text.

In other words, it uses its AI superpowers to edit and rewrite your voice-notes into other words, retaining your meaning while gracing it with renewed clarity and vigour.

The results are illuminating, providing an instant lesson in the power of paraphrasing, and turning your notes to self into notes you could happily send to someone else in an email or WhatsApp.

AudioPen is just one example of the practical magic of Whisper, a technology that is still in its early phases of development, yet is already capable enough to change the way you think, speak, and work.

Try it out at https://audiopen.ai/. It’s free to use, on desktop or your smartphone browser, for 10 notes of up to three minutes each.

After that, there’s a premium option that works out at $5 a month, for longer notes and a range of other benefits.