I was curious if anyone else uses these during their projects with Unity and if so do you write the file out by hand or use a specific program that aids with that?
Programs can’t write you anything you didn’t write before so at the end of the day it will always be you who wrote it by hand 
Using the SVN commit logs can help but are commonly totally overdetailed for “end user consumption”
Well, whenever I make a change worth writing about I pop it in a list and then release the list with the next version.
That’s what I have been doing, I was just curious as to how other developers go about doing it.