Can you imagine walking into an open-plan office on a busy weekday, seeing people at their desks – and hearing practically nothing? Like not even the staccato rhythm of fingers on a keyboard?
It sure seems like that could be the future of work, across all kinds of professions. Well, the ones that involve people working in front of computers, anyway.
You’ve no doubt heard plenty about AI disrupting productivity over the last couple of years, with the tech promising to accelerate workflows and advance progress in numerous research-intensive fields.
As it turns out, the literal way we work, i.e., what we’ll do sat at our desks, is also transforming.
AI is increasingly enabling people to ditch their keyboards and just dictate what they need doing. That includes everything from shooting off an email to drafting a presentation to vibe coding custom apps.
Dictation tools have been around for decades, and largely been commoditized to the point that your iPhone or Android device’s on-screen keyboard app ships with a free one. Over the last couple of years, they’ve gotten especially good, thanks to the emergence of widely available machine learning models for speech recognition, and lots of companies building apps on that foundation.
What’s happened recently is that there are now a wide range of speech-to-text apps that are shockingly good at their jobs, so much so that you can realistically use them at work and achieve a high level of accuracy and speed with your dictation.
Today, you can have an open source dictation app like Handy run a fully local machine learning model on your computer and ensure your speech is never sent to the cloud for processing, keeping your data private. You can also opt for an app like Wispr Flow, which uses larger models to clean up your ums, ahs, and misspoken words into text that requires less manual editing.
Wispr
Handy is the app I’ve been using for the last couple of months, by the way. I love that it’s easy to activate with a keyboard shortcut, and how it provides unlimited usage at no charge. Wispr Flow, on the other hand, is currently aiming for the enterprise market, meaning it wants to sell its dictation and note-taking service to companies. The firm behind it just raised a US$280 million funding round, at a valuation of $2 billion.
There’s interesting stuff happening on the hardware side of dictation too. Since January, Subtle, a San Francisco-based startup, has been selling its $250 VoiceBuds which look like regular wireless earbuds, but work with the company’s cloud-based service to pick up your speech, even if you’re in a crowded space talking over people or whispering softly so as not to be overheard.
Subtle says its buds interestingly don’t rely on high-end mics to hear you. That’s all real-time AI working in the background to discern what you’re saying from background noise. The company claims that its Voicebuds delivered up to five times fewer transcription errors than Apple’s AirPods Pro 3 combined with OpenAI’s transcription model in noisy environments.
I suspect Subtle will face competition in the very near future, which is to say that more people will likely want to get things done at work using earbuds instead of a keyboard. That’s not only because some folks dislike or aren’t great at typing, but because the scope of what you can accomplish by simply issuing a command is quickly expanding.
In other words, voice is becoming an increasingly powerful mode of input for computing. The basic hardware to use it is already widely available, and the services that enhance your input by clarifying your speech, inferring what you mean in specific contexts, and performing actions are evolving as we speak.
It might seem weird right now, but whispering sweet somethings to your device at the office might well catch on soon.
