Talk, talk, talk: The rise of AI dictation tools at work
For workers who routinely spend hours a day interacting with various AI assistants, banging out prompts on a keyboard can quickly become a chore. “Whether it’s a coding task, helping write a document or think about strategy — there’s just so much typing and typing and typing you do as a part of that,” said Chris Patalano, chief technology officer at Thumbtack, an online marketplace for professional services. With that in mind, Patalano and other senior colleagues last year began experimenting with new ways to interact with AI systems within Thumbtack. The idea was to test AI-assisted dictation tools developed by startups such as Monologue, Superwhisper, Willow Voice, and Wispr. Unlike previous generations of dictation apps that aimed to produce a verbatim transcript, newer tools rely on large language models (LLMs) to craft polished, edited text. The companies behind them claim users can produce text several times faster than typing, with greater accuracy than voice tools built into