Whisperflow is fun
I’ve been using Whisperflow for voice typing on my phone, and it is genuinely fun. The reason is simple: it just works, in any app, anywhere I can type.
The old friction was small but deadly. Pull up the keyboard, peck at the keys, fix typos - those 10 to 15 seconds were enough to break my flow, and a lot of ideas died in that gap. Now I talk at full speed while walking and the text is just there. I can work on the go instead of queueing thoughts for later.
Two things surprised me.
First, I can be fully descriptive. Typing trains you to hold back because every extra word costs effort. Speaking doesn’t, so I say the complete thing instead of a compressed version of it. Typing is also way slower than it feels - people believe typing is fast and quick, but it is not. Talking is better, and voice notes are better than text. That is an argument I am willing to hold my ground on.
Second, it handles Hindi and English in the same sentence, fluidly. I switch between my primary language and English without thinking about it, and the transcript keeps up. That alone removes most of the reason I avoided writing long things on my phone.
And none of this is limited to my two languages. The app supports a bunch of languages, and most of the world uses more than one language daily. So almost anyone can use it the way I do - this is not an edge case, it is the default for most people.
One open question is whether Whisperflow the business lasts. The product is great, but I am not convinced it has a moat. More on that in a future post.
I wrote earlier about how posts on this blog start as voice memos - Writing By Voice. Whisperflow is the phone half of that setup.