I learned to touch type at ten in England, mostly because my handwriting was illegible, and for the next decade it was a MOAT. I could get a thought onto a screen faster than anyone else in the room, and in the first stretch of AI that still counted, because the person who could type the most context and express themselves the most won.
However, somewhat bittersweetly, that era is over. Since ChatGPT copied Wispr Flow's dictation hotkey, I barely type at all. I spend the day talking to my laptop. I dictate to Notion AI, which is now my EA, then go over to Codex and eject a constant stream of thought. It is almost all gibberish, whilst symbiotically liberating.
Typing throttles me to a fraction of my actual chain of thought, whereas speaking dumps the whole messy stream in, so the model has more to wrangle with and the work that comes back is genuinely better.
Tech is already living here, which means the mainstream consumer market is about nine months to two years away. Jason Calacanis has a foot pedal, half the industry runs Wispr Flow, and the sales founder I spoke to last week is building his entire product around a dictation hotkey, because salespeople live and die by vocal communication.
This is the future of products: being able to multimodally interact with your laptop, creating a more robust and dynamic user experience.
The voice era is here
Most living professionals begrudgingly learned to type. Tomorrow, they will only have to hold a key.