R.I.P. Computer Keyboard (1964 – 2025)

0:00Why are we still stuck with keyboards? There are 700 million people with dyslexia and for them using technology means spelling words with a keyboard which is the literal hardest thing for them to do. The first time people use flow. Just give it one minute. That is all I want from you. The first dictation people do, they just speak something and they see within half a second it's perfectly there, it got everything they wanted. When people see that, that is the biggest aha moment for them. I need to start with a confession. I am voice-pilled. Here's why that matters. Humans speak at roughly 150 words per minute, but we think at closer to 400.

0:41The average typing speed is only 40 words per minute, creating a massive IO bottleneck between thought and interface. Voice isn't just older than writing. It's been our primary communication medium for 200 ,000 years of human evolution. The next leap in human-computer interaction isn't just about bigger language models. It involves voice, thinking out loud at the speed of thought, with systems that actually keep up. And today's guest is one of the people making that shift real, and he has been since junior high. At 11, he built one of the world's first voice assistants three years before Siri.

1:19And when he hit his teens, he'd already built and sold his first company. And now, as founder and CEO of Whisperflow, he's behind one of the fastest growing AI products in the world at the forefront of the post-keyboard future. I've experimented with Whisperflow, and so has my team. Here are some of the actual words from the biggest Whisperflow user on our team. Everyone I introduce to Whisperflow buys it. Take Whisperflow away from me, and I'm going to be upset. Why are you still typing? So today's conversation is about that shift. Why voice and why now? And what changes when speaking becomes the primary way we interact with computers?

1:57We'll also dig into Whisperflow's origin story and the future that appears when thought and creation start to merge. Here's our conversation with Tanae Kotari. Reid and I are obsessed with Westbound and everything that you all do. So just a huge thank you for letting us be here. We have guests all the time, but only once or twice a year are we in a live podcast setting. And so we are so thrilled to be here today, especially with Taneh Kotari, who is doing an incredible job building his new company, Whisper, translating speech to incredible, beautiful, polished text. So I will let Reid take it away.

2:34All right. Again, to echo what Westbound does and the community you guys are part of is extremely important. It's an honor and delight to be here. And we don't do that many of these live things. So that was part of the bow. So let's start with the kid version of Tanay because legend has it that you started programming at the age of 10 and secretly coding into the night when your parents thought you were asleep. So who was that kid and what do you remember about building that first voice assistant? So the story goes way back because when I was young I was good at math So what I convinced my math teacher to let me do is spend the math classes in the computer lab so I could play Pokemon and One of those days I was sitting there.

3:26I'm fourth grade nine years old and There is this 12th grader sitting beside me and he's building something which looks like a new game So I go up to him and I'm like, oh hey, what are you what are you doing? and he just looks at me with disgust and he's like you wouldn't understand not disgust slight over exaggeration but to me it was like no one talks to me like that and so I go back home I just remembered I saw it said visual basic on the top of the screen and I started teaching myself on YouTube how to write code and from that day what started off with me just naturally being a rebel and never take no for an answer started to become an obsession and I started to enjoy it for just the fact that I could think about something and just build it and then I saw the Iron Man movie and I saw Jarvis and then I was like that is what I want to build and so I came back home and then I called one of my friends up it's in the same class as me so now we're in fifth grade and I was like let's build Jarvis and he's like that's a great idea let's do that and so for the next two years we slept alternate nights.

4:39I would wait until my parents went to bed and grab my mom's laptop because I didn't have one and then I would call him up. We'd be on the phone call all night together and we would just build this thing and two years later we launched what was then one of the world's first voice assistants. This is before Siri, before Alexa. Hit about two and a half million users in the first six months and then Google shut us down and it was It was a whole roller coaster back then, doing it hidden from my parents, but fun childhood memories. When, if at all, did they figure out what you were doing? So I had to tell my dad when I got that letter from Google and I was like, terrified.

5:20It was like juvenile something, something. And so I showed it to him one morning. He was having tea. And then he was just, he had no idea I wrote code or did anything. And so then I told him parts of it. But I think the whole story I told them maybe when I went to college. Like, I actually never slept when I said goodnight to you. Well, it's a good prep for startups. And speaking of startups, so with Whisper, are you still on the Ironman Jarvis mission? I'm still on that same mission. I feel a lot of what you do as adults is just what you wanted to do as a child. and makes your inner child happy when you find that right mix of your career and making the young you happy.

6:06I don't think any other feeling beats that. So I have a 10-year-old, and he plays Pokemon, but I don't think he does any of the other things, but now I'm going to check on that. So you're a kid. You get the cease and desist from Google. You have 2.5 million users. How did that experience of Google shutting you down sort of shape the rise of Whisper and your interest in voice? I was initially really pissed because I spent so much, I spent two years building this thing and one day it's just gone off of the app store. And I was mad, annoyed at them for a couple of days, but then I was like, wait, I can just build this other thing.

6:49And they just took my app down, like they didn't stop me from doing anything else. and so over the next where middle school high school seven eight years that probably built and shipped 50 60 different products with friends and these are all things that were just like oh I wish there was an app for that and then we just go build it and then for some other people wanted it some other people didn't want it and for whisper it all came back when my co-founder now Sahaj, he reached out to me and he said that I'm leaving my company, thinking I'm starting something new. And I was like, you know, there's this one thing I've always wanted to build.

7:28And I explained this like vision to him of a personal assistant that just gets you. It doesn't make you sync time into screens, but more so just helps you be a lot more present. And if we can actually build technology that essentially just feels like a second brain, I think we can get that. And that resonated with both of us. And that was the birth of Whisper. So we're always talking about how AI can actually make people feel more human. And so speaking and voice is like the oldest human technology, older than writing. It's what people have been doing forever. How does voice matter to the future of computing and technology?

8:11When I hear that, the thing I think about is like, that is such an obvious question, where the question should really be like, why are we still stuck with keyboards? Because they came as an intermediate hack, in a way to help people use technology, use computers, for the few decades in between where they didn't really understand language. And now that we have it, we can continue to make this interaction just a lot more seamless. Because the thing with keyboards is, it is inaccessible to a lot of people. Like if you've ever seen like an old person like type this, like this is not what their life should look like.

8:51And they should not be subject to this pain. And this is almost like a discrimination of some sort to being more tech savvy, because it's a skill that they didn't learn growing up. It's interesting, the two people in my life who use voice the most are my seven year old son and my 80 year old father. So to your point, like absolutely accessibility up and down the chain. And so what do you think people misunderstand about how speaking sort of reorganizes thought and what it captures that's different than typing? So when I talk to a lot of people about why dictation, people are like, oh, you know, I type very fast.

9:28It's like, yes, you speak faster. But at the end of the day, the speed, to me, it's, yes, it's there, but that's not the biggest thing that matters. The biggest thing that matters is when you have an idea, you want your brain to go like this. like you're in the flow your ideas coming out but what happens when you're right that typing it out is did it up oh should I put a comma here how do you spell this word maybe I should put it in a new line I should put the sentence elsewhere and in the middle of what you want to just be a stream of thought be in the flow your brain is constantly getting distracted by the formatting and all the small nuances that come with actually writing it down and so the biggest thing that we saw when we started people using whisper flow they didn't talk about how much time it saved them they felt about how much easier life felt because this cognitive lord that they had all the time that's just like this mental process that goes on it just went away you just speak whatever you want and like it's just like an assistant who like I'll write this whole thing for you just like tell me your gibberish I'll take care of it and somebody just saying that in somebody you trust, that is the biggest value I think Whisperflow delivered to people, which I wasn't expecting, but something that we learned because that is how every single person described the product.

10:52Yeah, really amazing. And you know, obviously part of the thing is there's a reason why like when we three are communicating, we're not sitting here typing, we're actually using our voice. And it's like, like go back to that kind of naturalness about how we operate. And of course, there's also the insanity of the QWERTY keyboard, which is, let's deliberately slow it down 30%, which comes from the mechanical typewriter. So you've seen people go from, frankly, quite skeptical to instantly obsessed with whisper. So what do you think creates that voice-pilled kind of moment where suddenly they realize the obsolescence of the keyboard?

11:34There's a lot of reasons why people are skeptics. One, again, there's a lot of really fast typers who are like, I'm like great at this keyboard thing. There are some people who've just been disappointed with voice, which is anybody who's used Siri in the last 10 years, you know what I'm talking about. And three is just people who've never seen it work. And so they're just resistant to adopt new AI and technology and all of that. And this is like, for example, my dad. The key thing that we put that does the aha moment is the first time people use Flow. What I tell anybody is just like, just give it one minute, that is all I want from you.

12:15And the first dictation people do, they just speak something and they see within half a second, it's perfectly there, it got everything they wanted, it is written exactly in the way. And small things, if you change your mind, it cleans all of that up for you. When people see that, that is the biggest aha moment for them. And then five minutes later, you know, they're telling everybody. But we realize it doesn't stop there. Once they realize that, hey, voice can work, we get them to the second aha moment is making it work for you. So what is the problem that you're just feeling in your life? Do you wake up every day with 50 emails in your inbox and that's like exhausting for you?

12:55Cool. Let's work on that. And when people find this first workflow that makes life really easy for them, that's their second moment. Because now they've built a habit of voice. That is when I call people being voice-filled. Because there is something in their life that they're just now doing purely with voice. Could be Slack, could be emails, could be like texting your mom, could be you are in Cursor or other tools, wipe coding. And then the third aha moment is this metric we track, which is like flow versus keyboard, how much do you use it? The keyboard just almost becomes extinct. It's less than 5 % of what people use.

13:33And that to me is what true behavior change looks like. 100%. And are there any specific features or experiences like tracking that metric that switches, that gets to that, oh my gosh, I have now been voice pilled? Yeah. It is literally the keyboard versus flow rate. Like the number of characters you're typing with your keyboard versus how much you do with flow. And you just see that. It just goes up like this. And I think across, so this is something we measured some time back, across every flow user ever it's about 75 % is flow 25 % is keyboard and that has never happened in the history of computing that something has actually replaced what has been a part of our life for the last hundred and fifty years.

14:28So I think Reid let's skip to the demo I think this is a really good time to do that. Okay great. And so I think Marcus is here I mean if you want to tee it up what we're going to be doing right now. All right. So we've been talking about the transformative power of voice. We'll actually come back to its impact in AI and a bunch of other things part of this. But I'm sure at least some of you are wondering, what does this actually look like in real life? So we decided to actually, in fact, do a quick demo. So today, we believe voice is faster, clearer, more natural in typing. So we're going to put that to the test.

15:04and in this case, erase. Voice versus typing. So our competitors tonight are actually colleagues. Tanay and Marcus, who has proven to be an incredibly fast typist at something I can't do, 110 words per minute. Marcus, thank you for joining us. Yes, good to meet you as well. So I'm going to hand each of them a piece of paper. It says the same thing. It is a chat GPT prompt. And I think Tanay wanted to make it, he was like, I got this in the bag, so he's gonna drink red wine while he's doing it. He's getting a little cocky over here. Our coworker at Sanasi has$100 on Tanay, so if anyone else wants to take the other end of that bet, Marcus also, even though he works at Whisper, promised he wouldn't sandbag, like gonna try his best.

15:53And so we are gonna watch them both on the screens. I'm gonna give them the papers at the same time. One typing, one using voice, and we'll see what happens. Marcus, what's your typing speed? I type usually at 117 words per minute. Oh, so I sandbagged it in my opinion. Don't open it, don't open it. Alright, I'm going to say, on your marks, get set, go! Build a Gantt style timeline product for a product launch spanning 12 weeks. Phase 1 is market research, weeks 1 through 3. Phase 2 is design and prototyping, weeks 3 through 7 with a 2-week overlap. Phase three is development, weeks six through ten.

16:32Phase four is testing, refinement, weeks nine through eleven. Final phase is launch preparation, weeks eleven through twelve. Use different colors for each phase, show dependencies with connecting lines. I highlight the current week, add milestone markers for stakeholder reviews in week four, eight, and eleven.

17:03I didn't even know there were 11 pages.

17:10So do try this at home. I mean, I want to see, come on ChatGPT, make it happen. Come on. We got to get some feedback to Sam Altman here. Oh, there you go. All right, round of applause for both contestants.

17:31This podcast is sponsored by Google. Hey, folks, I'm Amar, product and design lead at Google DeepMind. We just launched a revamped vibe coding experience in AI Studio that lets you mix and match AI capabilities to turn your ideas into reality faster than ever. Just describe your app, and Gemini will automatically wire up the right models and APIs for you. And if you need a spark, hit I'm feeling lucky, and we'll help you get started. Head to ai.studio slash build to create your first app. So there's a whole stack of things. So now we've kind of introduced why voice building is important, why it's a transformation in terms of how we're going to be engaging in compute and environment around us.

18:12But let's start with, in a whole bunch of these areas, as we get into what this means for how we work, how we live, how we navigate compute. One of the most interesting ideas is app level awareness. The idea that voice assistants can understand the context. So what does Whisper let people do that typing fundamentally cannot? Not just the speed issue, but like this churning this human messiness into clarity. It just genuinely feels like it gives you superpowers. And so imagine if there was an extremely smart person who knew everything about everything, who surprisingly happens to also be your assistant, and they're just sitting there, listening to everything that you're saying, and just doing things on your behalf.

19:04This is somebody you trust. This is somebody that learns from you whenever it makes a mistake and you correct them. And this is somebody that just has context about everything that you're doing. So it's not just ChatGPT memories that just knows all the prompts you've written in ChatGPT, but no. It knows that you were just sending an email to this person, then you're writing a message to somebody else. And the fact that Whisper is there across your devices, you use it across every single application and it knows all of those things about you, makes it essentially this ideal assistant very similar again to Iron Man's Jarvis which was the the dream behind it and so the other magical thing that it does is when I'm thinking about say the AI adoption around the world us in this office we're all Silicon Valley techies like great we write our prompts we do our things we build our AI agents but my dad is ever gonna write a system prompt my grandfather doesn't even know what an LLM is and so if they're using say an LLM to write an email like my dad has to write hundreds of them every day he's gonna be stuck with whisper what we just say is like hey you know what don't worry about prompting there's no prompt there's no setup just do what you're doing we'll just be here we'll look at your screen we'll figure out this email thread we'll write it to the right person in your style and we'll take care of all of that and so on the surface it looks like a very simple product that you just press a button and and it works every time.

20:36But under the hood, there needs to be so much hard work that we're doing because we're just taking all this pain away from the user. And about 20 % of our user base is what we call silvers, is like people above the age of 60. And for them, it is the most delightful AI product that they use. Because it's just like one button, and it just works. I mean, also, to your point, like if you think about accessibility globally, not everyone has a laptop. Most people don't. And so it enables you actually to get so much work done or joy on your phone. And some of us, not going to name any names, might be a little excitable and put too many exclamation points in their emails.

21:16And Whisper can help with that, too, make you sound more professional. So my question is, is there like a surprising action? Like, what's the most surprising action you've seen Whisper users take with your platform? So this was really surprising in the early days where actually you know what there's a more recent one there was a dude this is last week in Amsterdam who just ran an entire marathon while wide coding an app so he had a laptop in his backpack AR glasses or like VR glasses to just see the screen a Nintendo switch controller that just toggled the function key. Just press a button and whisper works.

22:00And he also completed the marathon in a solid four and a half hours while white coding this app. And once some wire fell off and he had to re-plug it in. And that to me when I just saw that I was just like, this is ridiculous. Now I feel bad about myself. I neither white coded the app nor did I run the marathon. Yeah, well, actually, and obviously the question of if you're actually running a marathon, being able to speak while you're doing that is also quite impressive. Yeah. Yeah. So one of the real metrics that you care about is zero edit messages, which is, you know, how often when someone speaks, you know, see what Whisper produces and then send it without changing a word.

22:46Yeah. And, you know, Apple, Google, OpenAI, that's around 5 % or 10%. with whisper flow it jumps to 85 % how did you accomplish that it's 89 % now oh you want that we just released yeah awesome yes exactly so to me the answer is really simple which is everybody has been solving the wrong problem up till now there is one problem which is transcription which is hey I need movie subtitles so everything that is said you want that word for word then there is another problem which is dictation which is I say something and I want it written the way I want everybody has solved this transcription problem or tried to solve it and then assumed they were also solving this other problem but humans speak differently than they write the moment you realize this extremely obvious fact you just look at all these tools that you're like this is all kind of garbage for this specific solution and we just focused on that I want people to say something and I want whatever is in front of them for the user to be so happy with it they just press enter.

23:54And at the start of it this year it happened about 45 % of the time. Now it happens about 89 % of the time. The crazy fact is for the the median time from when you see a whisper message to pressing send like you also saw in the demo that I did it's half a second. People don't even read what whisper writes anymore they just trust the system to get it right. And to me that is extremely important because when I think about where we're going in the next five years it's moving away from our phones and laptops to a world where we have immersive computing devices, smart glasses, smart rings, anything and everything that looks like that.

24:31And in a world like that you don't always have displays to verify what you've said. And so that was the initial reason for why Whisper to build it as your ever-present assistant and this is one thing we just want to nail from the get-go. And one of the things that I think is particularly good about that realization is if people haven't done this, when you get this new age of AI, it's much better when it has a much richer prompt. And so if people are happy with the prompts, this is part of the whole voice-pilling thing. So say a little bit about kind of like what that engagement loop with AI systems looks like in addition not just writing emails but like being in this kind of new world of AI compute.

25:19Yeah that's actually huge because we've seen so many CTOs and VP of engineering at companies who are now forcing their teams to use whisper flow just because it makes their AI prompting so much better. So here's an example, You're an engineer, and engineers are lazy. As an engineer, I can say that. You go into cursor, you're writing code, and there's a bug, and you write, like, fix bug. Cursor is not going to fix bug, because it barely knows anything about what's happening. But when you use Whisper, you start rambling, like, hey, you know, I tried this thing, then this happened, and, you know, maybe, like, this thing I did five days ago might have triggered the issue, yada, yada, yada.

25:54It takes the same time to, like, speak this 30-second prompt, but now it just one-shots it every time. and most people in the world like somewhat impatient somewhat lazy they don't want to type out entire prompts and so by giving a lot of context to AI which AI needs people are actually way happier with the result for people and inside companies what you see is just like much higher AI adoption when they start using voice input as a tool to do that and you don't have to do back and forth by giving it more context sequentially you just ramble it out at once. I feel like it's also going to be huge for e-commerce.

26:31Because if I'm on e-commerce website, and I'm not going to take the time to type out, I want jeans that are black, that are wide leg, but I'm super tall, but I need this. But I'll say it easily. And so it'll actually just make the user experience so much better. But this one is for the skeptics out there. There might be skeptics in the room. Why is Whisper a standalone company and not just a feature bolted onto Apple or Google? Make the case. The way I think about it is, when we're building Whisper, we are challenging a lot of the norms that exist in the world today. A lot of the core ways people build technology, a lot of core ways technology itself is built, and it's not impossible to happen inside a Google or inside an Apple.

27:18But the bureaucracy and systems there just make it really hard to challenge the status school like imagine going into Apple and just saying Siri sucks we need to kill this team and I'm gonna build a much better city from scratch and that's a 6 ,000 person organization and no one's gonna let you do that which is why that assistant is still coming and a year now I had a year now do you think there's we've obviously talked about there's so many things you gain from speaking you were you know richer conversation all of these things do you think there's anything we lose from not typing from going from typing to voice the answer could be nothing so what you lose at times is the precision there are times where you really need to craft your words and how they're going to be delivered the thing is that doesn't need to happen all the time but in some times you do need it and that is the one place where I would say people resort back to editing with their keyboard another thing that I feel and this is the one exception to my belief that everything should be voice-built is when you're journaling I think people have different modes in which they journal.

28:29Some people are great there they think as they speak and so Whisper is great for that but some people think even better when they they write and so that's why they still love using a pen and paper and writing in a diary. So those things I don't want to force on anybody to do a different way, but for everything else, I think it's just a net positive. Awesome. So say a little bit about one of the natural questions that a lot of our local audience and obviously a recorded audience would have, which is, okay, look, I get all the benefits you've been talking about. You can do it much more naturally.

29:09There's less cognitive overload. you can you know do rich you know AI prompts but you're in an office we're sitting next to each other and where you like and it's like you know and maybe you don't want to be sharing or maybe you don't want to be interrupting you've already I know some of the answer this because we've talked about it already but share for the audience like what is that new office of the of the future look like why does it actually work you know what how is that kind of voice collision navigated? Yeah, so I don't have a perfect answer to this, but I do have some instances that that drive us towards the direction of what this could look like.