Captain Ratatype
When a voice note genuinely beats typing
You're mid-stroll, stuck in traffic, or at the park with your child — and a brilliant idea surfaces at exactly the wrong moment. Sound familiar? In those situations, the sensible thing to do is record a voice note or fire off a voice message to a colleague, a mate, or simply yourself. It takes seconds, and you can always sort it into a proper document afterwards.
Much the same goes for a quick search query or a casual question to an AI assistant when you just need a swift answer.
Beyond that, though, voice input rather lets you down.
5 situations where voice input falls short of typing
- You're in an open-plan office or sharing a workspace with colleagues. Dictating an email, composing a ChatGPT prompt, or messaging a friend aloud in a shared environment is, at best, inconsiderate — and at worst, quite unprofessional. It disrupts those around you, and frankly, your colleagues don't need to overhear your private conversations. In these circumstances, typed input is the only reasonable option.
- You need to enter technical content. Have a go at dictating "Create an async/await function with a try-catch block and return a Promise" — or an email packed with product codes, abbreviations, brand names, and surnames. Voice recognition still struggles considerably with proper nouns and tends to come unstuck when switching between languages.
- You want to revise your notes or redraft something you've already written. Picture yourself saying to your device, "Remove the third sentence of the second paragraph and swap 'uses' for 'applies'." Practical? Not in the slightest.
- Taking notes during a work meeting, a conference, or an online parents' evening is simply not possible with voice input. Typing, by contrast, lets you jot things down whilst staying fully engaged — without losing the thread of what's being said.
- Most people think with considerably more rigour when they write rather than speak. Speech is linear by nature — you narrate whatever comes to mind with no means of doubling back, reshuffling a phrase, or reconsidering your wording. Writing allows you to reshape a thought entirely and make it far stronger.
- In real-world conditions, voice input averages around 30–35 words per minute — once you factor in pauses, corrections, and background noise, that falls well below the typical typing speed of 40–55 wpm. Master touch typing, and you can comfortably hit 70+ wpm.
- Voice assistants correctly recognise only 95% of what's said. That figure sounds rather impressive until you consider that on a 500-word piece, it leaves 25 errors to hunt down and fix manually — and that's under quiet conditions. In a bustling office, the error rate rises to 12%.
AI is tipping the scales further towards typing
Until recently, voice input's main shortcoming was accuracy alone. The rapid growth of AI tools has added a compelling new reason to favour the keyboard.
Working with AI is, at its core, a written exchange. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot — every one of them revolves around a typed prompt. You might ask your initial question by voice, but the moment you need to refine the request, add nuance, paste in part of a previous response, or tweak the wording, you're back at the keyboard. As the world leans ever more heavily on AI, the ability to type quickly and accurately becomes a genuinely valuable skill.
Keyboard input is the native language of the digital world — and that makes fast, accurate typing one of the most worthwhile things you can practise in 2026.
Curious where you currently stand?
