Use cases
Remote workers: more writing, and a door
Distributed teams communicate in writing by default, which means remote workers type far more than office workers. They are also the only people who can dictate without annoying anyone.
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Two facts that compound
Remote teams write more. A question asked over a desk becomes a Slack message. A decision made in a corridor becomes a document. Context that would have been absorbed by sitting near people has to be written down explicitly. Everyone in a distributed team is producing several times the written output they would in an office.
Remote workers can speak out loud. The biggest practical obstacle to dictation is that offices are full of people who did not ask to hear your email. At home, alone, with a door, that obstacle does not exist.
Those two facts point the same direction, and it is why remote workers are one of the best-fit audiences for dictation and one of the least targeted.
Where the writing actually is
| Kind | Typical volume | Dictate? |
|---|---|---|
| Slack and Teams messages | Dozens a day | Yes — short and conversational, which speech is best at |
| Async written updates | Daily or weekly | Yes. The thing that is always too thin |
| Documents replacing meetings | Several a week | Yes, for the prose. Type the structure |
| Comments on other people's work | Constant | Yes — where the explanation gets cut for time |
| Handovers across time zones | Daily in some teams | Yes. The highest-value thing on this list |
| Meeting notes | After every call | Yes, within five minutes |
| Constant | Yes |
The handover is the one that matters
In a team spread across time zones, the message you leave at the end of your day is the only thing the next person has. When it is typed under time pressure it says "pushed the fix, see PR". When it is spoken it says what you found, what you tried, what you suspect, and what you would do next if you had another hour.
That is ninety seconds of speaking and it is the difference between a colleague starting where you stopped and starting again.
Typed at the end of a long day
Still looking at the timeout issue. Nothing conclusive. Will pick up tomorrow.
Dictated in 70 seconds
Still on the timeout. It is not the database — I ran the slow query log for two hours and nothing is over 200ms. It only happens on the EU region and only after about twenty minutes of idle, which smells like a connection pool being recycled rather than anything in our code. I have not checked whether the load balancer has its own idle timeout, and that is where I would start. There is a reproduction in the scratch branch: leave it idle twenty minutes then hit /search. Do not bother with the caching theory, I spent an hour on it and it is not that.
The home-office advantages
- You can talk. The whole ballgame. Nobody is listening and nothing is confidential from the room.
- You probably have a decent microphone. Bought for video calls, and recognition quality tracks the microphone more than anything else.
- You can stand up. Many people produce better spoken drafts away from the desk, and at home that is possible.
- Your connection is your problem. Home internet fails. On-device recognition does not care, which matters when your entire job is online.
The honest problems
- You are not always alone. Shared houses, a partner also working from home, children. The advantage is real and not universal.
- Co-working spaces are offices. All the same constraints, with less social licence to be the person talking.
- Speaking work things aloud at home is odd at first. It passes in about three days, and a headset makes it feel less strange.
- Async written communication is also a discipline. Dictation makes it cheap to write more, which is only an improvement if more is what was needed. It is easy to produce volume instead of clarity.
Setting it up
- Use the microphone you already bought for calls A headset or a desk microphone beats the built-in one by a wide margin.
- Teach it your team's vocabulary Colleagues, services, customers, project names. Work chat is dense with them.
- Make a handover snippet What I did, what I found, what I did not try, where to start. Dictate into each.
- Pick a shortcut that survives your video-call app Zoom, Meet and Teams all claim global shortcuts. Check for a conflict before concluding dictation is broken.
- Mute before dictating during a call Everyone does this wrong once.
Questions
Will my colleagues hear me dictating on a call?
If you are unmuted, yes. Mute first. It is the single most common embarrassment with dictation in a remote team.
Does it work in Slack, Notion, Linear and Google Docs?
Yes, all of them, with no integration. A system-wide dictation app types where your cursor is, so web apps and desktop apps behave identically.
Does it need a good internet connection?
No. With on-device recognition it needs a connection once, for the model download, and never again. Useful when your home broadband is the thing that failed.
I share a house — is this still worth it?
Partly. A close headset microphone lets you speak much more quietly than you would expect, which handles most of it. Anything genuinely confidential still needs a door.