Why everybody is talking to nobody
Ditching the keyboard for voice-to-text AI is called “voicepilling.” Will everyone stop typing?
VENICE, ITALY, May 12, 2026 — We just landed in Venice yesterday, and we’re staying in a friend’s apartment that we love. It’s close to the center of everything while being just obscure enough to be quiet and nice. Best of all, there’s a row of restaurants just outside our little alley that are simple, home-spun and great — very rare for the over-tourism mecca that is Venice.
Emily and I dropped another Superintelligent podcast, but this time dragooned into service my own son, Kevin Elgan. The topic was AI in schools, and Kevin knows more about this topic than literally anyone, and you’ll hear why in the podcast. Watch and/or listen here.
While in England, Amira and I re-launched our long-dormant Gastronomad podcast. We also moved our Gastronomad Experience Journal newsletter from Squarespace to Substack. Both the podcast and the newsletter are part of the same Substack account. Check it out here (it should be live within an hour or two of the publication of this podcast.
Welcome to the Machine Society.
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The AI that understands your spoken words and types them out for you has gotten very good lately.
So good, in fact, that millions of people are dumping the practice of typing and talking instead.
Fast forward a year, and we may notice that offices and coffeeshops will lose the clatter of keyboards, replaced by the din of dialogue.
Ten years hence, most people below the age of 50 may not be able to type much at all.
I’m still a devoted typist, but I can feel the pull of pilling thanks to two products.
One is Google’s AI Edge Eloquent. The iOS app does voice-to-speech fast and flawlessly. Another click and it does a quick edit and copies it. Switch apps and paste and I have skipped out on the typing process entirely.
The other is Drafts, which is a not-at-all-new note-taking app that I’ve recently been obsessing over for a variety of reasons I’ll write about once I’ve learned to use it better. Drafts has a great Apple Watch app (also great apps on iOS and macOS). I’ve elevated the app to a complication on the watch. By tapping that once, I can just start talking, and everything I say is taken down on the watch and appears instantly in the iPhone app. It will patiently wait while I gather my thoughts, typing again when I talk again.
Current trends in technology are driving great voice-to-text into everything.
But more importantly, social norms are also heading in this direction. We’re seeing a bit of pearl-clutching journalism, like
Husband Alarmed as Wife Starts Whispering Quietly to Her Computer
Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn, said that “voicepilling” is the process of realizing that talking instead of typing amplifies your productivity and creativity.
That’s great for individuals, but what about society? In other words, talking to your applications with AI as the mediator is easy in private and uncomfortable for many in public settings, and it’s that discomfort that is likely to fade away.
I’ve seen this before. In fact, in the 90s, most people felt uncomfortable talking on a cell phone in public. People later felt uncomfortable talking on a Bluetooth headset (because they looked like a crazy person talking to themselves). People felt uncomfortable typing on a screen rather than on a physical phone keyboard.
All those norms were obliterated and new norms emerged. And now the new norm of talking in public to nobody will take over very quickly.
It’s not really about writing. We’re still writing, in the sense that we’re recording our thoughts and ideas using the visual medium of a Latin-script alphabetic orthography.
It’s really about the abandonment of a historically recent contraption (the typewriter) and its digital successors.
