You can speak a message and watch it appear, punctuated and finished, in whatever app is open in front of you. No keyboard. Your voice going in, clean text coming out at the pace you talk. Every founder has a queue of people waiting on a reply from them, and that queue is the thing voice input removes.

I have dictated a million words into Wispr Flow on a 200 day streak, which makes it the stickiest software I use. The company has grown 40% month on month for 18 months thanks to its voice dictation tool taking off among business leaders, developers and creators. CEO and co-founder Tanay Kothari told me he thinks specifically about how the product makes people feel. Flow has just launched Notetaker, its first product beyond dictation, to take the feelings further.

If you are bashing away at a keyboard every day, consider that you are making things more difficult for yourself. Your goal is to find the work that lights you up, that feels easy. That's closer to happening when you talk instead of type. These founders were the slowest part of the business they built. Here is what each of them switched, how it transformed their week, and how you can copy them.

How talking instead of typing made Steven Bartlett and three other founders faster

Stop being the person everybody is waiting on

Steven Bartlett hosts The Diary of a CEO and runs Steven.com, a creator holding company valued at $425 million that contains a $100 million fund. He spends six to eight hours a day communicating across those businesses. "I become a bottleneck in my own company," he says. "It means that people that need things from me don't get those things from me, and that slows down the whole organization."

Composing a message went from 30 seconds of typing to five seconds of speaking. A 90% cut, which gave him one to two productive hours a day back while at airports and gyms and led him to investing in Wispr Flow . His team stopped receiving one-sentence answers. A full explanation now costs him the same 30 seconds a short one does. Pick the person who has been waiting longest on you, and answer them by voice tomorrow morning before you touch a keyboard.

Reply at the speed you think

Gaurav Vohra helped build Superhuman and now advises more than ten companies, including Wispr Flow itself, while raising three children. He typed 130 words a minute at a desk using both hands. These days, he speaks 150 to 160, one-handed, in a pickup line or holding a sleeping child. "I read, think, speak," he says. "That's the loop now."

The result was significantly faster work on desktop and mobile, especially compared to older dictation tools that made him say every comma out loud. Same person, same hours. Business moves fast, and you should too.

Take back the three hours that email takes

Email replies took Dean Payn two to three hours a day. He types with three fingers. He founded The Crate, a coworking company in Auckland, and sits as a partner at Business Blueprint. He now speaks those replies and stores the recurring ones as voice shortcuts, so the explanation he gives four times a week gets said once. "It Deanifies my work," he says. "It turns whatever I'm doing into the closest version of what I would actually say."

Three hours a day saved. Zero backlog across email and messages, and writing five times faster than before. Payn also dictates context into his call recaps the moment a call ends, while the detail is still in his head, which cut his recap time by about half. Do that one thing this week. Speak your notes into the file within sixty seconds of hanging up, before the next call takes your attention.

Build the thing while you are moving

"Why do I even have a keyboard with all these buttons when I can just push the voice button," says Tijs Nieuwboer , a self-taught developer in Amsterdam. He dictated 31,058 lines of code while running the Amsterdam Marathon, with a MacBook in his backpack and AR glasses strapped to his head. He lost the laptop connection inside the first kilometer, opened the bag mid-stride, reconnected and kept running. By the finish line he had a working app, a voice companion called Hypes that talks back when motivation drops.

Zero keyboards, one app shipped. The stunt shows where your building time goes. Sitting still is the constraint, and the bulk of your week happens while you are walking or waiting between things. Open your AI tool on your phone, describe the feature you have been meaning to build, and let it write while you walk.

Stop the meeting from generating work

After the success of Flow, the company built Wispr Notetaker, its first product beyond dictation. Notetaker transcribes on your device, so nothing joins your call as a participant. It brings the personal dictionary you built up in dictation into the meeting, so your acronyms and client names come out right. When the call ends it re-reads the whole recording and returns the decisions and who owes what, then exports into Claude or whatever agents you use.

Almost nobody reads a meeting transcript, and everyone has tasks to do from the meeting. The summary updates the follow-up email, the follow-up updates the CRM, and software now does all three without a person checking the names. An error in line four of a transcript ends up in a client inbox with your signature under it. Kothari's challenge for you is to run Notetaker beside whatever you use today for one week, read both outputs and keep the one that got the names right.

Save hours by talking instead of typing: play business on easy mode

A podcast host, a Superhuman operator, a multi-business founder in Auckland, and a self-taught developer in Amsterdam. Every one of them stopped being the slowest part of a business they built.

Pick your longest queue. The unanswered messages, the recap you have not written, the decision three people are sitting on. Speak it instead of typing it, starting today, and watch what your week looks like when nobody is waiting on you.

Get my free AI playbook for ambitious founders looking to scale.