Maybe you've heard the myth that the QWERTY keyboard layout was invented to slow typists down. The story goes that typists were too quick for mechanical typewriters and so someone came up with the idea of spreading out commonly used letters to slow things down. Today I learned that this is false.
In reality, the QWERTY layout was implemented to keep parts of the typewriter from jamming, but it also sped typists up because alternating hands while typing is faster than words that must be typed all with one hand.
Anyhow, this article talks about how keyboards (QWERTY or otherwise) are the bottleneck between us and LLMs, and how it would be far faster convey context and instructions to LLMs via our voices than a keyboard.
He makes a pretty good case that
Users will gravitate towards the AI system that allows them to input the most context with the least friction, making voice a superior input method for complex tasks.
And he even comes around to the reason he is probably wrong about this thesis: it's embarrassing to talk to your computer in public. Even if it isn't embarrassing, it is not always the case that you want other people to hear what you are working on. And since we are often working in close proximity to others, typing is probably going to remain the dominant form of communication with our devices and the software that runs on them.
I still want to write a scifi story about a world where voice communication with computers (or maybe just AI agents) has become commonplace and there are some people who are particularly gifted at hacking via voice commands. I imagine it as some distorted version of natural language and code combined in verbal form. It would be a little bit like such people were speaking spells which would make these hackers something more like wizards or warlocks...