Talking is about three times faster than typing, so why do we still type our thoughts?

Comfortable speaking sits around 120 to 150 words per minute. Strong touch-typists hit 60 to 80; most people land near 40. So speaking is roughly two to three times faster than typing for getting words out of your head. For a quick thought, a reflection, a message you'd otherwise put off, that gap is the difference between capturing it and losing it.

Speaking also lowers the activation energy. A blank text field invites editing-as-you-go, that little internal critic that rewrites the first sentence five times. Talking runs ahead of the critic. You get the messy, complete thought first and tidy it later, which is exactly the right order for capture. It also works hands-free, while walking, driving, cooking, holding a baby, the moments when good ideas actually arrive and a keyboard isn't an option.

Be honest: voice loses for anything structured. Code, tables, precise formatting, dense editing, all faster by hand. Voice is for capture, not composition. The strongest workflow isn't one or the other; it's speak to capture, then read the transcript and shape it with the keyboard. You get the speed of the mouth and the precision of the fingers, each where it's strongest.

The reason voice-first never quite stuck for sensitive thinking is that most dictation ships your audio to a cloud. Sprachmemo transcribes locally with Vosk, so you get the speed of speaking without handing your half-formed thoughts to someone else's server. Tap the circle, talk, and a searchable transcript appears next to the audio, no upload required.