Eight months ago, LinkedIn co-founder and former CEO Reid Hoffman confessed: “I am voicepilled.” 

He argued that talking instead of typing was the next great leap in computing. Being “voicepilled,” he said, was the epiphany that you can be vastly more productive and creative when not bogged down by the Victorian-era contraption known as the typewriter ,or its modern version, the PC keyboard. 

What’s changed is the rise of super high-quality AI-based speech-to-text tools, which not only capture what you say, but figure out what you intended to say, erasing your “ums” and “ahs” and tweaking your sentences automatically to be more articulate. 

The best example for this category of voice application on the desktop is Wispr Flow, which launched Sept 30, 2024. Other products include Superwhisper, MacWhisper, and others.

In recent weeks, some mainstream news outlets have noticed the rising phenomenon of voicepilling. For example, The Guardian published a piece earlier this month headlined, “The end of typing? Why workers are suddenly ditching their keyboards.” 

The Wall Street Journal noted the trend in an article called “Typing Is Being Replaced by Whispering — and It’s Way More Annoying.“

A change in technology is always accompanied by a change in culture and social norms. In my career covering technology, I’ve weighed in on several of them. 

In the 1990s, most people felt uncomfortable talking on a cell phone in public. Back then, my boss apologized to several of us at lunch for answering his cell phone, which he said he had bought only for emergencies. 

People later felt uncomfortable talking on a Bluetooth headset (because they looked like a crazy person talking to themselves). For several years after the advent of Bluetooth headsets, people routinely excused themselves and went outside. It was not socially acceptable to take a call around other people, for example. That norm eventually faded, and everyone started taking calls anywhere, all the time. 

Texting at the table was rude a couple decades ago. Now, it’s common. 

Doing video calls in public went mainstream during Covid. 

What the recent voicepill articles focused on was the norm-changing aspect of AI voice apps in offices. For example, The Wall Street Journal pointed out that offices are starting to resemble call centers, with the clatter of keyboards replaced by the chatter of dictation. 

But they’ve missed the real culture shift: the public acceptance of people routinely dictating and talking to AI via mobile and wearable devices everywhere —  not just in the office. 

While Wispr Flow and its ilk are changing norms in the workplace, mobile tools are doing the same on smartphones. 

For iOS, Google’s AI Edge Eloquent is the probably the best tool. On Android, Wispr Flow is the top dog. Both clean up text and fast-track the conveyance of your words to other applications. In other words, you can use them on all your applications, just like the on-screen keyboard. 

At Google’s Android Show on May 12, Google unveiled Rambler, a Gemini-powered dictation feature built directly into Gboard. Rambler isn’t available yet, but it will probably function just like Google’s AI Edge Eloquent. 

While smartphone apps will have some impact, the real transformation will happen with wearables. 

I own an Apple Watch. And I’ve lately gotten into the habit of talking to my watch many times every day. That’s because I’m using a note-taking tool on all my devices called Drafts. I’ve elevated the app to a complication on my watch. By tapping that once, I can just start talking, and everything I say is taken down on the watch and appears instantly in the iPhone app. It will patiently wait while I gather my thoughts, typing again when I talk again. It’s really good and really handy — literally!

And if talking to a watch is good, talking to AI glasses is great. 

The main interface for AI glasses is speech. In fact, AI glasses will be the first speech-first gadget most people will encounter in their lives. These glasses will deliver to our faces a ubiquitous personal assistant that we’ll chatter with all day. We’ll not only use AI via the glasses, but send emails and texts, and do dictation for all kinds of uses. 

By the end of the year, the number of AI glasses products will explode. Surprising no one, Google this week announced that Gemini-powered “intelligent eyewear” is shipping this fall — glasses that have speech as the primary interface. They’ll be competing in a market that includes Meta, of course, but also Snap, Amazon, Solos, Brilliant Labs, Rokid, Huawei, RayNeo, and Even Realities. When Apple enters the market, AI glasses will be officially mainstream.

Say goodbye to the skill of typing

Ten years hence, most people below the age of 30 might not be able to type much at all. I’m sorry, Miss Balish (my high school typing teacher), but I fear that the skill of typing will be tossed on the same ash heap of history as cursive writing, using a slide rule, telling time on an analog clock, and reading a paper map. 

I’m still a devoted typist, but I can see how young people growing up in a world of ubiquitous voice interfaces will find typing as useful as cursive writing with a pencil. 

It’s not really about writing. We’re still writing, in the sense that we’re recording our thoughts and ideas using the visual medium of a Latin-script alphabetic orthography.  But we’ll soon “write” by talking. Speech was the original language medium, and AI will bring us back to speech. 

Will we mourn the loss of another antiquated communication skill or revel in the return to humanity’s original and most natural medium: the spoken voice? If past technologically driven norm shifts are any guide, the answer is: both.

AI disclosures: I don’t use AI for writing. The words you see here are mine. I used a few AI tools via Kagi Assistant (disclosure: my son works at Kagi) as well as both Kagi Search and Google Search as one part of my fact-checking for this column. I used a word processing product called Lex, which has AI tools, and after writing the column, I used Lex’s grammar checking tools to hunt for typos and errors and suggest word changes.