Name: Voicepilled.

Age: Reid Hoffman first declared himself “voicepilled” in the autumn of last year.

Hoffman, rings a bell. Who is he? A co-founder of LinkedIn, Manas AI and Inflection AI.

Of course. Is he OK? Does he have a spot of laryngitis? On the contrary, he’s seeing things with a new mental clarity.

Got it – as in The Matrix, red pills and blue pills leading to different ways of seeing the world? There you go!

Actually, I still haven’t really got it. Voicepilled? What does it actually mean? “Being ‘voicepilled’ is that moment of realization that once you start seriously using your voice to interact with technology, you unlock a new way to amplify your ability,” Reid wrote in a LinkedIn post. “If you use products like Wispr or ChatGPT Voice, you know what I mean.”

But I don’t. So I don’t. We’re talking about dictation as an alternative to using a keyboard, and how this results in an increase in productivity, given that you talk significantly faster than you type.

Already tried it! Those dictation tools don’t work. They never hear me right, so I have to go through it all again. Plus, using a keyboard might be slower, but that allows me to organise my thoughts into some sort of sense. We’re talking about AI-powered voice dictation here. Paired with coding tools, a dictation app such as Wispr Flow can supposedly turn your unstructured musings into something coherent. Other brands are also available.

Such as? Aqua Voice, TalkTastic, Typeless, Superwhisper …

“I’m never gonna dance again …” Sorry, that’s Careless Whisper. But there does seem to be a lot of whispering going on. Is that because people are self-conscious about talking to themselves? It’s probably more about having to keep it down a bit, because everyone else is doing it.

Is everyone else doing it? It seems like it. “Across Silicon Valley, work is being remade as once mellow spaces become dens of din,” the Wall Street Journal reported this week.

Sounds annoying – possibly more so than the reassuring clackety-clack of the keyboard. Indeed. The WSJ spoke to one woman, who runs her own AI company, whose mutterings to her computer at home in the evenings seemingly caused tensions in her marriage.

Anyone else who might not be keen on the voice pill? Well, Mavis Beacon might not be too chuffed …

No! Mavis taught me to type! Me too. Although she’s not actually a real person – she was a character created as part of a software program to teach touch-typing. Still, maybe the fictional Mavis can open a voice school.

Do say (as Hoffman did): “To be voicepilled is to glimpse this future.”

Don’t say: “I’ll just take a throat lozenge, thanks.”