I almost stopped typing. The keyboard won't recover.

At the start of the year, I made a decision: stop subscriptions. Thanks to AI, I know how to develop my own tools, so why pay for yet another app?

Except that one app got me: Wispr Flow.

The principle is simple. One touch on the Mac or iPhone, I speak, and the text appears, clean and directly usable, in an email, Slack, a code editor or a CRM. The tool removes hesitation and understands my jargon.

The figures convinced me more than any speech:

• a very good typist types between 80 and 100 words per minute;
• in competition, we go up to 150;
• me, after six weeks of dictation, I was at 175.

In six weeks, I had dictated 17,738 words, the equivalent of a book. It's not AI writing for me. These are my words, at the speed of my thought.

Talking is faster than typing, and we think better out loud

Since then, I dictate almost everything to the AI. Speed ​​isn't the only gain. Out loud, we structure our ideas differently: we explain, we reformulate, we follow through with the reasoning. The keyboard pushes you to cut it short.

The machine now keeps pace

For a long time, voice recognition was the weak link. This is no longer the case.

In May, OpenAI released a new real-time audio suite. I pushed it to its limits: I launched a YouTube video at x2 speed, or around 350 words per minute. Everything was transcribed, in real time, with a quality that largely holds up.

The real leap isn't just accuracy. It's latency. The window between what is said and what is produced is narrowing to a level I didn't expect so soon. And that opens up very concrete uses: multilingual meetings, live call analysis, training, accessibility.

The end of forms

I took advantage of a rainy Sunday to test this new voice model. Result: an agent that listens to a conversation, pulls out the key information in real time, and fills in a CRM record without anyone touching the keyboard.

The demo interests me less than the idea behind it: voice as a new interface for business applications. No more forms, menus, fields to fill out. We speak, the application understands, acts and structures.

• The field technician dictates his report when leaving the customer.
• The caregiver completes their form during the consultation.
• The manager on the move creates a brief out loud.

Transcribing is level zero

A meeting without transcription is a lost meeting. But in 2026, transcribing is the minimum. What matters is what we do with it next.

In my team, each sales meeting transcript goes through an AI assistant which draws a summary: weak signals, who decides what, maturity of the prospect, next actions, follow-up email written. In seconds. We even made an app out of it, ClientSignal, built in 72 hours during a buildathon Lovable and Granola.

A good meeting from which nothing is extracted, it's just a forgotten conversation.

The real obstacle is not technical

If voice is so effective, why isn't everyone dictating already? Because in the office, no one wants to talk to their computer in front of their colleagues. The obstacle has never been technology. It’s how others see it.

That's why the Subvocal demo struck me so much. This startup, which went through Y Combinator, designed glasses that turn unspoken words into text. You mouth the words in silence, the system reads the tiny movements of the face and writes in real time.

And the use goes far beyond the open-plan office. For someone who has lost their voice after an illness, an operation or an accident, articulation often remains possible even when no sound comes out. Imagine: they articulate, the glasses transcribe, and a synthesized voice speaks for them. The person they're talking to has nothing to learn and nothing to install. They listen and they answer.

We are still in the prototype phase, and nothing says that it will work for everyone. But for the first time, an interface designed for productivity could give voice to those who have lost it.

Keep your feet on the ground

Do not confuse demo and production. When ElevenLabs showed a voice agent empathetically handling the cancellation of a flight, many cried out for the death of call centers. Watch the video a second time: it's a controlled demo, not a real call at 11 p.m. on a Friday night, facing a slow system.

Between the two, there is a canyon:

• responsibility: If the agent grants a refund in error, who pays?
• integration: he needs real-time access to the CRM, reservations, prices;
• borderline cases: the client who negotiates, who threatens, who requests an exception.

Appointment bookings and frequently asked questions can be automated now. Disputes and negotiations, not for several years. Call centers will shrink, not disappear tomorrow.

What really changes

The keyboard is not going to disappear overnight. But for the first time, voice is fast enough, precise enough, and well understood enough to become the default interface for many of our tools. What remains to be invented are the uses, and the way to talk to your machine without disturbing your neighbors.

And you, do you still only work on the keyboard?