The keyboard, an omnipresent feature in offices today, will soon become obsolete. You may say this is a bold prediction, but as generative AI becomes more advanced, people will increasingly interact using voice over text, making the keyboard redundant.
With AI’s capability to understand human speech at a near-human accuracy, we will witness a transformation in how we communicate with our devices. Voice commands are slowly replacing keyboards in areas ranging from office work to entertainment and consumer technology. The move from text-based interactions to voice-activated commands is not just convenient, it’s revolutionary for productivity.
It signals an evolution in how humans work, communicate and interact with the world around them. By freeing employees from keyboards and empowering them with advanced voice-driven tools, businesses can unlock greater efficiency and better collaboration.
The time to speak up is now, because the future of work is all about voice.
The power of voice-activated AI
Speech can be up to four times faster than typing and is the mode of communication people prefer. According to research from Jabra, over twice as many workers think voice is a better way to communicate with AI (36%) over typing prompts (15%).
Voice-activated AI helps users to control systems automatically, analyse data and automate tasks simply by speaking. It streamlines work and enables employees to complete menial or repetitive tasks faster, which is especially useful in hands-free or time-sensitive situations. But it’s important to recognise that the technology is more than just the voice-controlled digital assistants of the past. This means no more typing – just natural conversation with AI systems that can listen, understand and respond in real time. Voice-controlled AI makes it more natural for people to treat the technology just like a colleague, asking inquisitive questions and then having an open dialogue.
When first introduced, voice assistants like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant generated a lot of excitement. Workers saw the potential of these tools; however, reality often fell short of expectations. They could give you the latest weather forecast, search the internet and dictate partially accurate messages to send to your contacts – but in the end, the use cases were too limited to have any meaningful change for an office worker.
However, recent developments have made some impressive leaps forward. While we are still far from human-level intelligence, the latest models are far smarter than their ‘voice assistant’ predecessors – and companies are seeing this too. According to the same research, the majority (82%) of companies are curious about AI’s workplace benefits, and nearly half (43%) of companies plan to incorporate AI into their working practices. Business will want to use AI differently and voice-powered AI and speech recognition will undoubtedly be transformative for workers across a wide range of industries.
Unlocking productivity and collaboration
Whilst speech recognition technology was already quite mature, unlocking its full potential required generative AI to create responsive, genuinely useful voice assistants. To understand why, imagine using voice to write an email. If we only had speech recognition this would be a bad experience as spoken language lacks the conciseness and structure for clear written communication. This is where generative AI excels as these models are already excellent in understanding your intent. You can speak to it for minutes, and it can summarise the essence of what you mean to say. Then, it can take actions on your behalf.
With ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot today you can already answer e-mails, summarise meetings, create presentations, write computer code and more. However, each of these tasks can be accomplished faster with voice. Not only are the responses faster, the conversational nature of interactions with AI leads to natural responses This helps reduce cognitive load on the user as they don’t need to parse what an AI model is trying to say. With the combination of these technologies, there are no tasks left where using a keyboard is faster, or more instinctive to use, than voice communication.
The possibilities are not just limited to an employee’s interactions with their AI assistant. Rather, AI will totally overhaul the way that employees conduct meetings. AI voice transcription will ensure that every meeting is a productive one, where every participant can immerse themselves in collaboration without worrying about the burden of taking notes or keeping minutes.
Video conferencing technology with AI-powered features can further enhance the hybrid meeting experience; tailored for today’s workplace where it is now commonplace for meetings to have at least one online participant. For example, video bars with Multi-stream Dynamic Composition provide a view of participants in the room, including closeups of the most recent speakers and a panoramic view of the whole room. This enables remote attendees to follow the action and experience a more engaging, interactive meeting where everyone can be seen and heard. To add to this, precision voice detection and enhanced noise suppression use intelligent algorithms to cancel background noise and optimise the meeting experience.
Finding your voice for the competitive edge
As AI continues to improve, the voice-powered future of work is already here. Yet its effectiveness is heavily reliant on sound clarity, as noise interference remains one of the biggest challenges for voice-based systems. If you are in a noisy environment, AI models simply do not understand you. This goes beyond using it in right environment – a third-party study looking at the effectiveness of AI transcription accuracy in noisy environments showed a large difference between professional devices and the consumer earbuds that people bring to the office. The difference is night and day when it comes to voice recognition. With the 55% accuracy consumer devices provide, AI simply can’t understand what you ask it to do. Professional devices with 95% accuracy precisely pick up voice inputs, which is absolutely necessary for being understood and maximising the benefits of AI tools.
Generative AI is arguably the future of productivity, but this can only be achieved through strong voice implementation. The era of the keyboard is fading into history. But whether businesses are ready to harness the power of voice to supercharge efficiency is another question. With voice-activated AI presenting transformative benefits for workplace productivity and collaboration, businesses looking to get ahead need to start speaking up now.
