Voice and AI are reshaping how we capture ideas, automate tasks, and unlock hidden moments of productivity in our daily lives.
For people who are busy and in constant search for more time in the day, Voice is a massive unlock to save time and get more done. There are a bunch of reasons you may be saying Voice doesn’t work for you, but the introduction of AI paired with Voice is giving us a glimpse of a new world with new use cases for Voice that’s worth a fresh look. 👇
AI turns voice into actionable text, unlocking hidden moments of productivity throughout your day.
⏱️ Voice + AI is already saving me time
I captured the ideas for this entire blog post recording a voice memo while driving to the grocery store 🚗. I tapped a button and my blog post was drafted and ready for editing. Every time I see a bug in our product🐞, I send a voice message to the team about it, and hit a button and a Jira is automatically created. The last presentation I put together 🗣️, I just talked about my ideas for what needed to be included like I was talking to my team, and hit a button and the presentation outline with suggested slide content was done. Imagine how much time this could save you in your day. ✅
⚠️ Voice has limitations
Before talking about why Voice can be magical ✨, let’s look at some of the limitations of voice that have fueled the voice vs text debate. Voice can often be unstructured and meandering as it follows someone’s stream of consciousness ideas prior to filtering and restructuring. Voice is also linear and opaque, which can make it hard to go back to and find what was said in the past. And for many people, voice is slower to consume compared to text.
💪 Voice has strengths
However, voice has strengths as well. It’s faster to speak than to type, which makes it easier to just get a thought or idea out quickly. Voice can also be done while on-the-go and walking 🚶, which research shows is when we are most creative. 🧠 And, Voice lets us capture ideas in their raw form, while text requires us to first distill and edit those ideas before they can be expressed.
✨ Voice + AI is Best of Both Worlds
Whether you’re a Voice or text enthusiast, AI introduces a new workflow that brings them together in the perfect way to revolutionize the way we work. This saves a tremendous amount of time and even creates new moments of productivity that used to be otherwise lost.
Imagine the freedom and flexibility of being able to detach from the screen and keyboard and yet still get more done? You leave a client meeting and you can quickly summarize in voice the update and next steps for a CRM. You can draft a follow-up email or capture a new business idea. You don’t need to stop what you are doing and spend time to type it out or mentally bookmark it and hope you’ll remember it later. With a quick Voice memo, you can capture the idea quickly and move on.
AI then does the hard work to take the voice notes and simplify the structure, finish the incomplete thoughts, organize and distill the related ideas in a logical flow. This gives you a text output and strong starting point that you can edit when you are ready. This is the superpower of AI – the ability to output structured text from an unstructured stream of consciousness brain dump.
This is the superpower of AI – the ability to output structured text from an unstructured stream of consciousness brain dump.
💡 Why is this important?
Screen time is already maxed out. Any screen time spent doing one task is at the direct cost of other screen time. Productivity gains will not come from spending more time typing out ideas, but instead will come from step functions improving our ability to capture our ideas when we have them and collaborate with AI and others to get them distilled into something actionable.
🤖 Weren't Voice Assistants suppose to do this?
In theory, yes, this was the promise of voice assistants, and, for many quick actions and command responses, they’ve been great. Voice assistants have failed to deliver this type of productivity gain because the dialogue with voice assistants often relies on and requires very precise structure and prompting, and if things are confused, the whole process goes sideways, introducing frustration and taking more time. This limits your ability to just capture the idea and then go about your day.
This new world of Voice + AI allows us to take the simple capture of voice and unstructured thoughts and then decide later which types of AI Actions to apply. Because the audio is preserved, it’s also easy to go back and re-listen to remind ourselves of what we were talking about when words on the page don’t quite match the excitement and spark of the idea when we had it.
🎙️ The combination of Voice + AI unlocks new opportunities
I think you’ll be surprised about how much more productive you can be leveraging voice in combination with AI in your workflow. AI turns voice into actionable text, unlocking hidden moments of productivity throughout your day.
Have more questions on how I’m integrating Voice + AI into my workflow? Ask below! 👇
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