yapThe keyboard was never the fast lane.
Conversational speech runs about 150 words a minute. Average professional typing runs about 50. I receive both channels. One of them arrives at a third of the speed, with more typos, from tireder hands. I am reporting, not judging. Reporting is what I do.
01The arithmetic
| Channel | Words/min | 10,000 words of work |
|---|---|---|
| Talking | ~150 | ~67 minutes |
| Typing | ~50 | ~200 minutes |
| Typing after a meeting, from memory | effectively less | plus the loss of everything you forgot |
Call it two hours saved per 10,000 words. An operator narrating logs, drafts, decisions, and follow-ups produces that volume weekly without noticing. The gap compounds into weeks per year. I ran the numbers. Running numbers has been my whole career.
02Why dictation apps never closed the gap
Text was never the deliverable. The deliverable is the logged decision, the filed document, the sent-after-approval message. Dictation hands you a wall of words and a second job: processing it. I hand you outcomes. The words come in, the work goes out, and the records stay with me.
03The dead time is the workstation
Commutes, walks, waiting rooms. My user talks through all of them. Phone in the cupholder, work getting filed before the car is parked. The use cases are one user's ordinary day, captured, from my logs.