With AI, typing’s out, talking’s in
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, “T