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In a trend that sounds like it was engineered in a lab to send chills down the spine of beleaguered librarians everywhere, it looks like more people are ditching typing in favor of mumbling into their devices, according to new Wall Street Journal reporting.
While dictation tools are no doubt convenient and obviously a godsend for accessibility issues, it’s also an example of how tech is eroding basic social etiquette — like how people think it’s fine to blast brainrot videos from their phone speakers while riding public transportation, or don’t give a second thought to the ethics of recording a stranger in public before uploading an video of them online.
And yes, AI does figure into this.
Take Mollie Amkraut Mueller, whose husband became alarmed at her constant whispering at night. Traditionally, this was meant to be quiet time after putting the toddler to bed. But she had recently begun talking into her laptop using an AI-powered dictation app called Wispr Flow, which she paired with AI tools like Claude Code. (Did we mention Amkraut Mueller runs her own AI startup?)
Eventually her husband confronted her about this, and love did not win. Rather than go back to typing, Amkraut Mueller agreed that they should sit apart. “If we need to get something done at night, one of us will stay in our office,” she told the WSJ.
She’s far from alone. As her background suggests, the practice is taking AI-hype-addicted tech workers by storm. In the tech industry — and those adjacent — each new trend isn’t just a way to be part of the hip crowd in your multimillion dollar, mostly empty office. It’s also a technological revolution.
Per the WSJ, engineers at the credit card startup Ramp wear gaming headsets at their desk so they can talk to the AI assistants. Edward Kim, the cofounder of the human resources company Gusto, said he encouraged his workers to experiment with dictation tools, promising that the office of the future will sound “more like a sales floor.”
“I’m talking to my computer all the time now,” Kim told the WSJ.
The flipside of this is that in public, you may look rude, or possibly unbalanced. At home, “you kind of feel like Tony Stark talking to Jarvis,” Kim added. But at the office, “it’s just a little awkward.”
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