Welcome And The End Of Typing

Speaker 0:00

Hello and welcome back to SEO is Not That Hard. It's me here, Ed Dawson as always, and today I want to talk about something I've been noticing more and more, and possibly you have too, and that is that people have stopped typing. Now, not completely, but more and more of us are now just talking to our computers, our phones, our AI tools rather than by tapping away at a keyboard. Now, if you grew up on science fiction like I very much did, then this is the kind of thing we were always promised. Captain Picard walking onto the bridge just says, "Computer," and then asks for whatever he wants. Tony Stark doesn't type anything, he just chats to Jarvis while he's building his suit Michael Knight talks to his car. Remember KITT? Dave Bowman talks to HAL, although that one didn't quite end perfectly well for Dave. And then there's the film Her about 10 years ago where they spend the whole film just talking to an operating system through an earpiece, and at the time it felt like a weird dream distant future. But my favorite though is the bit in Star Trek IV where Scotty gets beamed back to 1980s San Francisco. He sits down in front of a Mac, picks up the mouse, holds it like a microphone and says, "Hello, computer." And everyone laughs because back then, of course, computers didn't work like that. That's was the joke. In 2026 they do, and that joke has quietly stopped being so funny. And I'll be honest, I'm one of the people doing it. I used to think voice was a bit of a gimmick. Dictation was for people who'd hurt their wrists or for leaving yourself a garbled reminder in a car, that kind of thing. But in the last year or so, the tools have got fast enough and accurate enough that talking has become a proper way of working.

Why Voice Tools Suddenly Work

Speaker 1:48

So why now? The real reason and the simple reason, it's speed. We speak on average around about 150 words a minute, but most of us type at 40 to 60. So that's a three or four times difference before you've even started in how fast you can get words down if you're speaking rather than typing. But speeds on its own isn't the whole story because, old school dictation was fast too, but nobody really used it. The difference now is what the tools do with what you save. So take something like Whisperflow, which is what I actually use, and I'd highly recommend anyone to use Whisperflow. It doesn't just transcribe you, it actually edits as you go along. So all the ums and ahs and sorts of, and the you knows, they just disappear. And more than that, it actually listens to what you mean. So if you're halfway through a sentence and say, "Actually, no, I mean this," it deletes that first thing you said, and it keeps the correction. And you can talk the way like you'd talk with a colleague with all the false starts and the backtracking and all that kind of thing, and what lands on the page is clean. And that's the bit that's changed everything. Dictation used to give you just a plain transcript. These tools, what they do is they give you a draft. It's the closest thing we've got to the ship's computer just understanding what you meant. And that isn't just me using this or even people, working at the cutting edge of tech. Apparently- roughly half of US workers now say they use AI on the job, and a growing slice of that is voice rather than typing. And there's papers like The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal reporting that offices are starting to sound more like call centers with people dictating rather than typing. I've even heard stories in developer communities of people losing their voice from talking to AI all day. Now, that tells you something has shifted. And there's an interesting one there around the offices. Maybe the future's gonna be less open plan offices and more people are going back to have individual offices, 'cause if we're sat there talking to a computer all day long, to actually get work done and being able to concentrate, you might need to have individual offices again, like they did in the sort of the 1950s and '60s before the open plan office came into existence and became ubiquitous But the thing that gets really interesting to me, and the thing that I've noticed more than anything, and the reason why I would push anyone to try using voice over typing, is that when you're working with an LLM or an agent, whether you're planning something, discussing what you want to build, using an agentic tool like Claw Code, the quality of what you get out depends massively

Better AI Results Through Context

Speaker 4:35

on how much context you put in. And when you type, you self-edit, you tidy it up, you leave stuff out because it feels like too much effort to type. You want to get, you want to get on with it rather than putting all that context in. So you don't put as much in. But when you type-- Sorry, when you talk You don't. You just give a stream of consciousness. You say things like, "I want to do this, but also bear in mind that last time we had this problem, and the client doesn't like that, and actually, ideally, it should also handle this other case." You'd never type all that, but you'd happily say it, and the model gets five times the context in half the time of typing it, which means- It gets better context, which means it gives you a far better answer. Voice removes the friction between what's in your head and what the tool you're working with actually knows. This is the Tony Stark thing, isn't it? It's like he's not just writing specifications for Jarvis, he's thinking out loud, and Jarvis keeps up. The same thing applies to boring everyday stuff, replying to emails, Slack messages, leaving notes for your team. Once you're proficient and used to this stream of consciousness way of working It's actually really very good for creating and editing written content, including content for websites. You can get so much more done. And here's the thing I didn't expect, it often comes out in a friendlier, more human tone. So when you type, you tend to go a bit formal, a bit stiff. Again, you edit, self-editing as you go along and trying to be efficient. But when you speak, you lose that formality. You become much more natural. And for a lot of web content, that's exactly what you want it to be like. You want it to read like a person speaking to you And especially now we're competing against AI slop, if it reads like a person wrote It's gonna be more engaging for the person who's reading it, and also you're gonna get around that issue of being able to be watermarked as AI And on the search side now, apparently 32% of consumers now say they choose voice over typing for everyday searches. And the use cases have moved beyond basic tasks into shopping and local discovery and things like this. And there's research from Jabra and the London School of Economics projecting that voice AI will become the default workplace interface by 2028 Now, I'm not saying the keyboard's dead. It isn't. Typing isn't just slow speech. It's a different way of thinking. When you need precision, when you're writing code line by line, not that people are doing so much of that anymore, but if you are, when you're doing a final edit, you'll still type. When I do an email, I will use voice to compose the email, and then I'll just read quickly back through it, and I will make the final edits with a keyboard, 'cause it's quicker than trying to go back and do it by voice in that case. So there are... The keyboard's not dead. And also, if you're on a train, 40 people on a train talking away to their computers or their phones, I don't see it happening yet, but who knows? It might become the norm in the future. But I think the social norm at the moment is that people won't do that so much. But that is where things like WhisperFlow come in, because apparently WhisperFlow, you can use it at very low volume and it still is quite accurate But there's a bigger thing here that matters for us in SEO and on online marketing.

Voice Search Changes SEO Strategy

Speaker 8:06

If people out there are now talking rather than typing their searches, this changes the queries. Nobody's going to s- say the query "best running shoes men UK" out loud. What they're gonna say is things like, "What are the best running shoes for someone who's just started doing 5Ks and has got a dodgy knee?" The queries get longer. They get more natural, more conversational, and more specific. They carry context that those typed queries of the past don't. They also ask follow-up questions, and that's the exactly the kind of query that LLMs are built to handle and that classic keyword stuff pages are terrible at. So the practical takeaway in this is, one, we've gotta write content that answers people's questions the way people ask them out loud, not the way they'd type them into a search box 10 years ago. Secondly, we need to make sure our business information, our products, our pricing our FAQs are clear and structured because when someone asks an assistant a question, it's gonna pull from whatever is easiest for it to understand. And thirdly, if you haven't tried working by voice yourself, give it a proper go for a week. Push through the awkwardness. It does feel weird to start with. I know 'cause I've been there, and I've done it, and this is from someone who sits here and talks in front of a podcast microphone three times a week for three-plus years, okay? I know it feels weird, especially for emails. I find it weirdest answering emails actually to start with using voice. But push through. You will soon find it revolutionizes your day, your week, your month because you will get so much done. You will answer emails quicker because rather than being laborious chore, you can just quickly voice answer, get that response out to people Your work with AI will be better because you give so much more context to your agents And also your hands will actually thank

Try It For A Week

Speaker 10:04

you for it. Now, this is a weird one because about a year, just, yeah, about a year ago, I was in quite a bad car accident. And it wasn't my fault, I hasten to add. Someone pulled out right in front of me as I was driving along. They pulled out of a petrol station, or gas station for you in the US right out in front of me, and I hit them straight on s- on the side. And I was holding onto the steering wheel, obviously, and a lot of the energy of the crash came up the steering wheel into my hand and damaged my thumb joint. Not to the point of anything being broken, but it just made it sore as hell for ages, and it wasn't getting better. But since I started using voice for the majority of my interaction with the computer and a lot less typing, my thumb has recovered. So if As you get to a certain age, all those youngsters out there, you won't know this yet, but as you get older, the repetitive strain of using a keyboard is a real thing. There's a whole industry out there of people and tools to help people get round the issues they can have when typing at keyboards. But this voice technology is the complete answer to that. So anyway, from that digression I just want you to, yeah, I would strongly say give it a go. Push through the awkward feeling where you feel a bit daft talking to yourself. It will make you faster, and it will improve your content. It will improve your work. And it is how your customers are starting to search, so you need to get in the groove with it. We spent 50 years watching people on screen talk to their c- computers in films and TV and think, "That'll never happen." It is happening. It's happening on a Tuesday afternoon in an open plan office in a rainy city in the north of the UK, not on a starship. We're moving from a place where people discovered you by typing and clicking to one where they discover you by asking, and they ask with that much greater detail of context. And the sites that do well are gonna be the ones that have an answer ready when the computer gets asked. So that's it for next time. Thanks for listening, and until next time, take care of yourselves, and I'll see you next time.