Most people type at 40-50 WPM. Developers can often type at 70-100 WPM. Meanwhile, most people can talk at 120-200 WPM. Beyond just speed, we've found with many people that talking things out tends to flow more naturally, since it's often a lower friction action so people don't "sanitize" the text in their head before outputting it. Leads to better prompts quite often :)

> talking things out tends to flow more naturally,

I've found the opposite. Typing feels much more "deliberate", and of course you can hit backspace but you can't un-speak a word. With prompting, I've found that, in general, speaking leads to lower-quality results than typing.

My spouse and I have a rule that if we think a discussion is going to be emotionally charged, we have it over text in different rooms.

It sounds autistic, but writing and reading allow you to be much more precise, careful, and deliberate with your words and helps reduce impulsive outbursts.

This has worked really well for us, as crazy as it sounds.

> My spouse and I have a rule that if we think a discussion is going to be emotionally charged, we have it over text in different rooms.

I've done this myself with my wife and I.

> It sounds autistic

Well, I'm autistic, and she has a very high traumatic intelligence. She reads my body language, expressions, movements more than what I say. And she says things... but it's not actually what she means. By us writing/typing things out, we're able to communicate without stray signals creating noise.

Letters play a big part in the plots of Jane Austen's novels for a good reason.

I was surprised to find after using dictation heavily all year that I actually talk a load of rubbish when I'm speaking, using all kinds of cliches and fillers and saying way more than was needed.

Yes, I feel very similar. Maybe it's just that my verbal intelligence is lower than average but it feels that the signal to noise ratio is much lower when I speak off the cuff vs when I type.

Same experience. Faster, but also much more filler.

The bit before your quote was

> with many people

Not everyone. I, at least, definitely overthink what I type, and while I end up with nice-ish sentences in my prompts it takes a lot longer than a train of thought that the AI parses correctly most of the time anyway.

Yes, of course I wasn't trying to speak for everyone. Just my personal experience :)

You can prompt your way out of this.

Also, speech is probably bottlenecked by speed of thought, not making the sounds. I recall some study showing that data rate is pretty consistent between languages, despite wpm varying significantly due to language verbosity. You can try it yourself: try to quickly repeat “one two three four five” then try to read a paragraph out loud as quickly as you can, I bet you can feel the first strain your muscles and the second your brain, and I bet the first blows your typing wpm out of the water.

But what you're calling 'talking things out' I consider to be forming thoughts. I want to do that myself upstream of the LLM. I don't want to pay per token for my half-baked stream of consciousness.

I'm dyslexic and while I can type fairly quickly it's always a struggle to get the spelling and typing mistakes fixed. Talking is a much more natural way to express myself. The frustration of not being able to spell the word that I want doesn't exist. Mis-transcription errors are of course an issue, but those are getting fewer and fewer.

Hard to paste in 2k words of context when you're talking. I don't think voice is the solution for most people who need to communicate heavily with AI.

When I try talking for prompting my coding agents, I'm always severely disappointed with the specificity of the prompt. It's just much easier for me to "talk about" coding specifics with a keyboard than it is for me to speak about them, for some reason.

I suspect this has to do with the nature of the work you're doing; I dunno, just count me firmly in the camp of people who only rarely feel like I can express a thought sufficiently for coding agents with their voice.

I guess it depends on how close to the code you want to work. I find that I lately talk only about the features and UX and can leave the coding details completely to the agent. That might not work in every project, but I suspect it might work more often than people think because it's hard to adapt to the quickly increasing capabilities of LLMs.

I think a good habit is: Try to make the agent fail at least once a week with a too ambitious request. This got surprisingly hard lately :)

Yeah, we have a lot of experience with typing while our eyes and mind are occupied elsewhere. But I've noticed the years have slowed my typing.

I'm the same. I also can think ahead / along much better while typing. When I'm talking I'm just talking, not thinking as much.

But I guess thinking is going out of style anyway.

That said, I know a lot of people prefer talking to their computer, especially when their computer is a phone. So there is definitely a place for stuff like this.

You need to train yourself to speak written speech. When you do that, the thought processes behind typing your words activate, and your language use changes.

As a person who often talks far too fast and incoherently, but types generally fast and legibly, I had never recognised or even considered this, but it seems helpful. Thanks.

Why bother when old ways work _and_ there is no benefit? Or name one.

How?

One approach is reading your and other people's written speech out loud. Pay attention to where it feels awkward; for me, that was the direction I needed to practice. A trick that I use currently to reinforce speaking written speech is using Grammarly to make corrections, which I try to internalize.

Another trick is don't correct words and letters. Say the sentence you really meant to say. It is not uncommon for me to say a thought or a concept two, three, four times in a row as I'm wrestling with what the language should be on the written page.

I talk faster, but beyond the speed, I find it allows me to explain things to the LLM much more naturally.

On my phone, I do. I still like to tap with my thumbs, but my iPhone keyboard sucks so when I need to type a lot, I’d rather dictate.

Most people talk faster than they can type. 80 wpm voice chat is easy for everyone. 80 wpm typing filters out most typists.

This has been an interesting thing for me to watch as it's such a case of people having widely different experiences. I'm sure people that didn't grow up on a keyboard like me can probably talk quicker than they type, but even aside from me being a fairly good typist my speech is held up by being a bit more halting, a bit more of backtracking on word choice, sometimes not quite the same 'voice' of writing as I'm aiming for, all of which obliterates any speed advantage it'd have for me.

But happy to see people get more options.

This reminds me of Eternity's End by Jeffrey Carver and the implants they had. Released in 2000 but the more time goes on the more the neural implant technology is coming about. To be fair I think Enders Game had similar tech to detect subvocal speech like this product.

> This has been an interesting thing for me to watch as it's such a case of people having widely different experiences.

Same. I'm often told I talk too fast, but I feel I communicate slowly because a lot of my fast speech involves halting and backtracking and such.

I can easily type 100WPM+, but I trivially blast out a few paragraphs of perfectly adequate text in a few seconds and then spend a few minutes re-editing it.

Writing also filters the useless crap that is spoken but is not worth writing down.

Yes, I'd estimate the vast majority of people speak faster they can type. Not sure about the thinking part because I usually have 20 threads going parallel in my head and can't imagine what normal thinking would be like.

While sitting at the desk, I type about as fast as I talk. While unloading the dishwasher I'm a much faster talker than typer

I'm not reading aloud most of the time that I'm talking.