Though I’ve always loved science fiction, when I was growing up we only had one Star Trek movie…Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. It was haphazardly recorded off a TV rerun, and only 75% of the movie was remotely watchable. But I probably watched that 75% at least 25 times.
There’s a memorable scene from the movie where Scotty, a starship engineer who has traveled back to 1986, is handed a computer mouse. He immediately starts speaking into it.
“Just use the keyboard,” Dr. Nichols instructs him.
“A keyboard,” Scotty replies dryly. “How quaint.”
Even 40 years ago, Hollywood envisioned our future selves would end up talking to computers. And well, why wouldn’t we? Humans have been talking to each other for many thousands of years. We’ve been typing to computers on a QWERTY keyboard for mere decades.
The keyboard was always just a stopgap.
For as long as we’ve imagined personal computers, we’ve imagined talking to them. After all, even as far back as the 1960s, it would have felt odd for George Jetson to sit down and type out instructions for his robot-maid Rosey. And R2-D2 didn’t come equipped with a keyboard, either.
Apple and Microsoft have been chasing voice as the primary method of computer interaction for decades. In 1987 Apple released a concept video for the Apple Knowledge Navigator. In it, a professor speaks naturally to a digital assistant that pulls research together, keeps track of his schedule, and connects him with a colleague. Speak what you need, and the computer gets it done. Nine years later, Bill Gates told an MIT audience that speech was the “holy grail” of computing.
So, what took so long?
Well, the machines weren’t ready; and then, even when you could talk to a computer, it wasn’t fun. To start, you needed to pause. between. every. word…which made for a UX that was maddening. People may want to speak to a computer naturally, but they definitely don’t want to speak unnaturally.
Until the 2010s, most computers in the world were fixed to a public or semi-public place. Unsurprisingly, people quickly realized offices, labs, or shared family rooms weren’t ideal places to dictate their thoughts or talk through a difficult problem.
And this brings me to a hurdle I hadn’t expected: talking to a computer can feel…embarrassing.
Which is normal. New technology always feels strange and uncomfortable even when we know deep down it’s inevitable. The first time I saw someone wearing AirPods in 2017 I thought they were earrings. The first time I wore them, I felt a little silly…and so did you. But wow were they good. And after a decade of battling earphones falling out of my ears, it took me about 15 minutes not to care, sideways stares and all.
A few weeks ago, I was driving my son to practice and resumed a conversation with ChatGPT that I’d been having earlier in my office. But with him sitting next to me, I suddenly felt sheepish. He could hear me think, but I wasn’t done thinking.
With voice, the new-technology strangeness doubles, because you’re not just receiving information, you’re giving it. Out loud. Naked, in a way. With all your messy, ugly thoughts exposed for the world (or worse, yourself) to hear and judge. There’s comfort in being able to hide behind a keyboard, especially when you’re in the middle of working through a difficult problem or wrestling with an idea you barely understand yourself. With voice, it’s almost like having a stranger watch you rehearse a speech you haven’t yet written.
Whether you’re in a traditional office or alone with your dog in an empty apartment, the question becomes the same: when does the benefit outweigh the embarrassment?
For some of us, it’s an entirely different process, and entirely different processes are hard to embrace. I can just tell a computer to do something and it does it? It seems fantastical. Until recently, the gap between what we could imagine and what the technology could do was too wide to bother closing.
But voice tools are finally getting a lot of traction. Something changed in the last six months.
More and more people have started talking to their computers, with most using a hybrid voice/text approach. In a recent survey of 527 knowledge workers, 42% said they’re currently using speech-to-text. Likewise, in a study by Menlo Ventures, 27% of AI users switch between voice and typing, while another 19% primarily use voice. Wispr, one of the most popular AI dictation tools, recently raised at a $2B valuation.
This will only accelerate. I wasn’t an AI-voice laggard, but I certainly wasn’t an early adopter, either. And yet, just three weeks after making voice my primary method of working, I’m not going back.
My prediction: within the next few years, voice will overtake typing as the way most people prefer to interact with their computers, at home and at work.
Several factors will accelerate this shift:
Anyone who has a child between 10 and 17 knows how comfortable they are speaking directly into their phones, Dick Tracy-esque Apple Watches, or home assistants, interacting in public and without embarrassment with friends, acquaintances, and all of human history. As with many tech trends, younger generations embracing new technologies in public makes it all feel a little more…inevitable.
People will get work done so much faster using their voice that they’ll feel hamstrung when forced into a typing-only environment. Habits are hard to break, and leverage, once realized, is harder to give up. Even now, sitting in a public coffee shop writing these words, it feels like I’m typing with missing fingers.
Once you realize you can communicate with (or better yet, create) software from anywhere, work will cease to be something you sit down to do. And who wants to stay tethered to a desk?
If you could be just as productive taking a walk on a beautiful day as sitting at your computer, many of us would choose that walk.
That’s easy.
But what if every idea that popped into your head could be brought to life with a few words, no matter where you are at the time? That’s where this is going. People who use voice every day are starting to see this, the way early internet adopters “got” that having the world’s information at their fingertips would change what work meant.
So why are people resisting? Partly because it feels wrong (unnatural?) when the computer talks back; it’s not that we’re talking with an artificial…thing…and more that we know it’s an artificial…thing. Even as good as Astra is in “conversation mode,” we wouldn’t pretend that it’s the same as talking to a friend across the kitchen table. At least, not yet.
But in late October when Block, Jack Dorsey’s company, previewed a new voice model called Dessa, I was startled by how natural the voice sounded. Startled. And part of my job is not being startled.
And they claim it’s small enough to run on a MacBook Pro, by the way.
So, let’s play this out. Voice continues to gain traction. Use cases expand. Two-way voice communication becomes the default for most research and work. Most knowledge workers demand this functionality from their employer. The models get so good you forget it’s not human. Or worse, you don’t really care.
This also leads to some interesting second-order implications.
Soon, software will compete to be the thing you delegate to. Once people describe an outcome instead of clicking through each app, the conversational interface owns the customer relationship. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, knows this, which explains the company’s buying spree over the last six months.
If the conversational interface, not software, owns the relationship, businesses will need to accommodate the trend. How do you manage widespread voice use in a large office? Probably begrudgingly. Since people will become comfortable with speaking into computers at home, settling for a productivity-neutered work environment is a curious bet against human behavior. Ultimately, the very tenets of a traditional office layout need to change: Quiet rooms, acoustic separation, and privacy become basic requirements of attracting talent.
As speaking to a computer becomes more common, it is only a matter of time before human-looking avatars become the thing we want to talk to. Right now we happily talk to a chat interface because it feels least weird, but some studies show we actually trust that AI face more than voice alone. Over time, we’re going to expect our AI agent to have a human face by default, and our kids will laugh that we used to talk to a glowing sphere.
We get the magic wand the LLM vendors have been promising since 2022: you speak into a computer, an avatar asks a few questions, and it happens. I guess this could happen with typing, but then you’re still tethered to a keyboard, which just…saps the magic.
This is why people who get comfortable with voice now will have a major advantage.
Recently, I saw this tweet from Aaron Levie, founder and CEO of Box.
It’s almost incomprehensible how wide the distance is between someone who’s working at the frontier with AI and basically everyone else right now. The crazy thing is these lines are not converging, but only growing farther apart. If the curve of AI progress had leveled off, it would certainly have given most people and companies time to catch up or implement their workflows in a standardized way. The technology would have neutralized competitive advantage because everyone would be using it the same way. But what’s happened is the opposite. The curve of AI progress is basically going vertical right now, which means if you had codified your processes 3-6 months ago you’re likely already behind again. Now imagine most companies that kicked into gear a year ago and thought that they were done. Even further behind now. I’ve never seen a technology in my life and career that improves at this rate, which consequently means you need to upgrade your expectations at a similar rate. Our brains weren’t wired for this, and our organizational change management processes certainly weren’t either. With any form of recursive self improvement, things just get wilder. It’s a time when you will need to be constantly reevaluating the things that didn’t work just a couple months ago to see if they now can be solved. AI native companies certainly have a strong advantage due to this right now, so now it comes down to can the bigger companies keep up. Wild times.
I agree with Levie, but the divide he describes is more about adoption than access.
In 2026, voice has become a good proxy for those willing to use technology to do new things, not just do the same things a little better. After all, the real benefits of talking to a computer go well beyond writing the same text, faster. It changes our role from the one who inputs to the one who instructs, a modern-day version of how GenAI early adopters get to “think different.” And, once you get used to it, the keyboard starts to feel like the strange part.
Which makes me think, maybe Scotty was onto something.