Yapping not tapping

More and more people are now talking to AI voice dictation tools rather than clacking the keys. Will ‘voicepilling’ make everyone more productive — or just more annoying?

EIGHT MONTHS AGO, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman announced, with an unusual level of pride and satisfaction, that he was obsessed with talking to his computer. Not just in the sense of chatting with a chatbot — no, literally talking at the computer.

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“I am voicepilled,” he wrote. “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.”

He is far from alone. In the tech and white-collar sectors, interacting with your computer (which is to say, increasingly, your AI agents) via voice commands is becoming more of an accepted norm. Once regarded as an accessibility function, voice-to-text is becoming the preferred method of interacting for more and more computer workers.

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“I’m talking to my computer all the time now,” said Gusto co-founder Edward Kim, speaking to The Wall Street Journal. “I don’t type unless I absolutely have to.”

The paper cites one venture capitalist who described AI startup offices as “like showing up at a high-end call centre,” where “everyone is chatting with AI.” Headsets in the office, WSJ said, are more often about chatting to AI assistants than they are about playing music or podcasts.

The sudden rise of voice-to-text is a technology story to a degree — voice-to-text apps have proliferated widely in the vibe-coding era, enabled by access to powerful and inexpensive AI transcription models that can be downloaded right to your phone. One Toronto startup, Superwhisper, was one of the first to bring a product like this to market in 2023.

“If you’re talking about replacing every keyboard on the planet, it’s just such a huge market,” said Superwhisper founder Neil Chudleigh, speaking to The Globe and Mail. (And he’s not wrong — the market for dictation tools is expected to grow from nearly USD$4 billion in 2026 to more than US$16 billion by 2035).

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The only problem? Many people think it’s kind of annoying.

“You kind of feel like Tony Start talking to Jarvis,” said Kim. One company founder told WSJ her talking to her computer habit had made things a bit difficult on the home front, as it was annoying her husband.

But the voicepilled among us believe that, with time, everyone will be yapping, not tapping. “It’s the societal change that needs to happen,” said Tanay Kothari, co-founder voice-to-text app Wispr. “You are not a crazy person for talking to your computer.” Kieran Delamont