Hey friends,

The only thing my leadership team is allowed to type now is their passwords.

That is not a line I use to sound clever on stage, although it does get a reaction. It is a rule. We made a deliberate decision a while back that inside our organisation, we stop typing and we start talking.

People assume it is about talking to AI. It is broader than that. It changed how we write emails, how we edit documents, how we leave a comment on a LinkedIn post, how we brief each other. Anything you would normally type, we now say out loud. And once you feel the difference, going back to a keyboard feels like writing with your non-dominant hand.

Start with the boring, mechanical reason. Speed.

Most people speak at around 130 words a minute. Most people type at around 40 on a good day, and slower than that when they are trying to think and type at the same time. So before we get to anything clever, talking is roughly three times faster than typing.

That is true whether you are drafting an email, writing a document, or briefing your AI. You are leaving most of your speed on the table every time you reach for the keyboard.

This is the part people miss, because most of us judged dictation years ago and never looked back.

It used to be rough. It got words wrong, it left in every "um" and "you know", and you spent more time fixing the text than you saved. So we tried it once and gave up.

That has changed. The newer apps transcribe in real time, autocorrect as they go, and quietly strip out the filler words and false starts. You talk normally, and what lands on the screen is clean text, ready to send. Not a messy transcript you have to repair. So this is not only for prompting an AI. It is for the reply you owe a client, the LinkedIn comment you have been meaning to leave, the document you keep putting off because typing it feels like a chore. You talk, it writes, and the output is good enough to use.

Here is the thing that surprises people most, and the reason they hesitate.

You do not need to speak in neat, finished sentences. You can ramble. You can backtrack. You can say "actually, no, what I mean is" halfway through. Modern AI is genuinely good at making sense of jumbled, messy speech. It reads through the mess and pulls out what you actually meant.

So drop the idea that you have to be articulate before you start. You do not. Just speak the way you think, and let the tool do the cleanup. And the more you use it, the better it gets at understanding you. The instinct to polish first is exactly what keeps people typing. Let it go.

There are a few of these on the market now. I have only tried one properly, Wispr Flow, and I liked it enough to keep using it. There is a free version, so you can start without committing to anything.

It sits across everything and turns your speech into clean text wherever your cursor is. I am not here to sell you a specific app, and I have not tested the others, so I cannot tell you it is the best one. The point is the habit, not the brand. But if you want the lowest-friction place to start, that is where I would start.

When you do point this at your AI, something extra happens.

AI needs far more context than you will ever bother to type. At a keyboard you ration your words. You write three short sentences, hit enter, and hope. You leave out the background, the constraint, the real reason you are asking, the thing your gut already knows.

When you talk, that ceiling disappears. You explain the whole situation. You say "the background here is" and "the thing I am worried about is" and "last time we tried this." You give it the full picture the way you would brief a smart colleague who just walked into your office. And that extra context is the difference between a flat AI answer and a genuinely useful one.

The classic mistake is to type a thin little prompt, get a flat answer back, and conclude AI is not ready. I have watched sharp people write the whole thing off this way.

They were right about the answer and wrong about the cause. They starved the tool of context, then blamed the tool. Talking fixes this almost by accident, because the moment you speak instead of type, you naturally give it ten times more to work with.

One catch, because people get this wrong and then get frustrated.

Most AI tools have a microphone built in, and there are usually two different voice options. There is the microphone that turns your speech into text and hands it to the full, powerful model. Use that one. Then there is the conversation mode, where you talk back and forth like a phone call. It feels impressive, but it usually runs on a more limited version of the model. Fine for a quick chat. Not for real work.

So the rule is simple. Use the voice-to-text microphone that feeds the proper model, and skip the live conversation mode when the work actually matters.

I am going to ask something of you that I do not normally ask.

Do not save this for later. Right now, before you move on to the next thing, download one of these apps onto your laptop or your phone. Set it up. It takes about five minutes. Then start speaking instead of typing.

I do not say this lightly. This one habit has changed my life. Not just my workflow, my life. The amount of friction it has taken out of my day is hard to explain until you feel it for yourself.

And then I would ask one thing in return. Give it three days, real days of actually using it for your work, and email me at [email protected] to tell me how it went. I read every one, and I would genuinely appreciate the feedback. And if you are feeling enthusiastic about it, share this with your network on social. Someone you know is still typing everything, and this is exactly the nudge they need.

We did not ban keyboards to be different. We banned them because typing was quietly making us slower, and lazier with context, at the exact moment talking became good enough to replace it.

The tools are already better than most people think. The habit is what is holding the results back. Change the habit, and the work you have been putting off, and the AI you wrote off last year, both start to look very different.

See you next week,

— Aamir

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