Typing is being replaced by whispering—and it’s way more annoying

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Mollie Amkraut Mueller’s mumbling was starting to get on her husband’s nerves.What was once a sacred nightly routine—putting the toddler to bed, collapsing onto the couch and opening their laptops to finish their work in peace—had become anything but peaceful. Instead of typing quietly, Amkraut Mueller started to hold down the function key and talk in hushed tones to her computer.Amkraut Mueller, who runs her own artificial-intelligence business in Seattle, is hooked on Wispr Flow, a dictation app that users are pairing with coding tools like Claude Code and Codex to turn rambling, stream-of-consciousness prompts into coherent, usable text in seconds.Efficient, yes.

Annoying, you bet.It didn’t take long before Amkraut Mueller’s husband told her they needed to talk. The couple now often sit apart.

“If we need to get something done at night, one of us will stay in our office,” she said.Across Silicon Valley, work is being remade as once mellow spaces become dens of din.One venture capitalist said visiting AI startups today is like showing up at a high-end call center—except everyone is chatting with AI. Engineers at credit-card startup Ramp sit at their desks wearing gaming headsets so they can talk loudly to their AI assistants.

Gusto co-founder Edward Kim has encouraged employees at the human-resources company to experiment with dictation technology, telling them the office of the future will sound “more like a sales floor.”He’s trying to set an example. “I’m talking to my computer all the time now,” said Kim, who happens to consider himself a decent typer.