Everyone’s Using This A.I. Dictation App That I Want to Murder With a Hammer

I haven’t written a single word of this. Well, I guess I have technically quote-unquote written this in that I am the author of the words. But I haven’t touched the keyboard. The words you’re reading appeared here on this page from my voice. I spoke them, and they immediately and accurately appeared? This feels like a magician’s trick, or like I’m some kind of 1940s Don Draper type with an army of transcriptionists in my employ.

I’m using an app called Wispr Flow, an A.I. voice-to-text app. According to the tech bros on X and Reddit, it is a key to sharing their genius with the world by unshackling them from the need to type, as well as a tool that will unlock the full force of human civilization. Reid Hoffman and Marc Andreessen use this. Why? Wispr Flow claims an extremely high degree of accuracy, and also that by using it, people can write four times faster than they write with their hands.

Although I’m actually not sure how A.I. is involved in this. I just went to another tab and spoke into the search box: “How is A.I. involved in the app Wispr Flow?” And it told me the answer is that the software’s A.I. can handle natural speech and convert it correctly really well in real time, even if you’re doing something complicated like writing a play with multiple layers of dialogue or vibe coding a project on GitHub.

I’m looking at the paragraphs above and I’m really itching to edit them. A lot of these sentences are bad. But the whole point of Wispr Flow is that you don’t edit. You speak naturally and organically. You CAN double back in your speech. For instance, you can say to Wispr Flow, “Delete that last word,” and it will do it for you pretty seamlessly. But you can’t tell it to take this sentence and put it there, or to go back and change that preposition above, or to reorder some of your paragraphs so that the argument has a more logical flow. You can’t tell it to make you sound smarter, or at least not yet. (Note from this story’s editor: The magazine has made light tweaks out of pity for the reader and writer alike. Also, our writers do not use A.I. tools to write articles except when specifically testing them for articles about such technology.)

In the past, when I’ve tried to use dictation features on my iPhone while walking or holding too many objects in my hands, it’s abysmal. I’ll speak a Slack message to my boss like “I’m running late to the meeting” and that little wheel will spin for several seconds and then it will straight up convert the text into something like “I absolutely loathe you and never want to see you again!”

In contrast to all that, Wispr Flow’s speed and accuracy are pretty astonishing. You can quite literally whisper to it at the softest possible volume, like I’m doing right now, and the transcript will be almost perfect. When you set up the app on your computer or phone, you can also tailor the way it renders your speech for specific contexts as well. So for instance, you could have it type out all your emails with capital letters and exclamation points and all your texts in lowercase with no commas. It’ll cut out all the filler words in your speech, such as “like” and “um,” if you want it to, or you can choose to leave those in by selecting a casual tone. Wow. Earlier it wrote down the words “quote-unquote” and now it’s already doing actual quote marks. I guess that tracks, because one of the things the app told me when I set it up was that it would learn from my voice and start to ***yze my common speech patterns.

If I start to speak a list, it will understand it’s a list. The things I need to do this morning are:

● Buy bananas

● Write this article

● Learn how to endure the sound of my own voice

For a year or so now I have seen Wispr Flow praised by M.B.A. types online, but what caught my eye enough for me to try it out myself was an article from Bloomberg in May reporting that the start-up was in funding talks for a $2 billion valuation — $2 billion! Just to save people a few minutes and carpal tunnel! Can you add a link to the Bloomberg piece, Wispr Flow? I guess not. (Note from this story’s editor: The link is here.)

I’m reading these paragraphs above again now and I think I sound like an idiot?

To tell you the truth, I hate this. I hate Wispr Flow so much. I hate that so many people in the world are lauding this like it’s the greatest invention, when actually I think it’s making everyone sound a little like an idiot, and now everybody has to read everyone else’s idiot words. I wish I could describe elegantly how much I hate it with some kind of handy, clever metaphor, but that kind of creativity comes to me through writing with my hands.

Because writing, when it comes down to it, is a higher form of thinking. Writing takes time and editing and a deep level of commitment. Writing is a rigorous process to understand your own thoughts and then lay those thoughts out in a way that convinces or inspires or moves other people. But speaking is not that process. Speaking out loud can be tremendously useful when you need to deliver instructions or talk something out with another person or jot down a quick brainstorm while you are in the middle of washing your face in the bathroom or something.

We’ve been talking a lot about the so-called end of literacy, but the real problem isn’t that people don’t read — it’s that they do read and spend all day ferociously consuming words, but those words aren’t really written, not in the way that any writer would consider them written, because the words they’re reading are more like speaking. I wish I could italicize the word “really” in that last sentence. Italics really. Uh. Close enough, I guess.

I just got a notification from Wispr Flow congratulating me that I have written enough words with the software in just these few minutes here that I have “written 12 wedding vows.” Which, I mean, is kind of my point. Can you imagine if wedding vows were off-the-cuff speaking? Could we stop, soon, with the apps and programs that want to replace every facet of human thought with something more efficient, like there’s no value at all in … reflection? At this point I’m ready never to speak aloud ever again.

It’s a few days later, and my editor has just read this draft and informed me that my first paragraph is factually incorrect: Don Draper is famously a 1960s man. That’s really embarrblocking, and all I can say is thank goodness for people.