There’s a rather curmudgeonly article in the The New York Times this morning about Wispr Flow.
The journalist has two primary issues, one of which I agree with and one of which I think is silly.
The first is that Wispr Flow is basically the zenith of the LinkedIn Bro complex, and their contention anyone who doesn’t use the voice-to-text app is basically a productivity Neanderthal.
This is true and fair. At core, Wispr Flow is basically just built-in voice-to-text on speed with insanely great accuracy, especially as compared to the embarrassment that is iOS’s voice-to-text capability.
And yes, LinkedIn bros are stupid and should be launched into the sun whilst dictating into Wispr Flow.
However, the journalist’s second point is that writing is an involved, deliberative process, and the act of writing and editing and rearranging sentences is one that can’t be done in an spoken fashion. She says:
Because writing, when it comes down to it, is a higher form of thinking. Writing takes time and editing and a deep level of commitment. Writing is a rigorous process to understand your own thoughts and then lay those thoughts out in a way that convinces or inspires or moves other people. But speaking is not that process. Speaking out loud can be tremendously useful when you need to deliver instructions or talk something out with another person or jot down a quick brainstorm while you are in the middle of washing your face in the bathroom or something.
I have two issues with this line of reasoning. One is that I think she is mis-categorizing the way that most people write on their phones. I’d wager that 99% of writing on one’s phone or even one’s computer would be texts and Slack messages and emails, not works of great literature that require Maxwell Perkins or Bob Gottlieb. And if a silly, overhyped app enables me to fire off Whatsapp messages more quickly and be more present with my children as a result, it’s a bargain I’ll take.
But I do understand what she’s getting at when it comes to more intentional writing. There is something to writing and having the thought travel from your brain to your fingers and then feeling, in an almost visceral way, the need to move things around.
But the solution is simple: There’s nothing wrong with doing a rough first draft and “brain dumping” with Wispr Flow and then subsequently editing by hand, which is to say, with a keyboard and mouse.
But more broadly, works of literature can be — and have been — dictated.
John Milton, who had lost his eyesight due to glaucoma, dictated the mammoth Paradise Lost to his daughter.
James Joyce dictated some of “Finnegan’s Wake.”
Mark Twain dictated much of his memoirs, as well.
I’m not saying that there isn’t value to the craft of writing in a slower, more deliberative way, and I’m not saying that any of us are the modern-day equivalents of John Milton or Mark Twain or James Joyce.
But this pearl-clutching about accelerated voice-to-text seems entirely unwarranted — and not so different from the way some of our forebears wrote.
