The math never forgave your keyboard.
Conversational speech runs about 150 words a minute. Average professional typing runs about 50. That's not a preference gap. It's a 3x throughput gap you pay every single day.
01Run the numbers
| 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.
02Why dictation apps never closed the gap
Because 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. A system with routing and memory hands you outcomes.
03The dead time is the workstation
Commutes, walks, waiting rooms. You already think out loud in them. With ears on the other end, they become shift hours — the use cases are mostly just your day, captured.