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

In this special live episode of Possible, Reid and Aria sit down with Wispr Flow founder and CEO Tanay Kothari to explore a post-keyboard future where voice becomes the primary way humans interact with computers. From building one of the world’s first voice assistants as a child to creating a product now used the world over (with, as of publish, 70% user retention after one year and daily users at over half of the Fortune 500), Tanay shares how Wispr Flow removes the cognitive friction of typing and restores natural communication to our digital world. The conversation touches on increasing accessibility to AI, emotional tone in digital communication, and why speaking to computers may ultimately be more human than typing ever was. And shortly into the conversation, Tanay puts his tech to the test in a live demo that pits a 110-words-per-minute typist against Wispr Flow in a dramatic battle of speed and accuracy. This episode showcases what is possible in a future where technology fades into the background and nudges people to become more present in the real world. A big thanks to Sean Mendy and the Westbound Equity Partners, and David Stiepleman and the Sixth Street Partners for hosting the conversation. And a shout to Isabella Sikaffy and the Florabella Studios team, Marshall Potter and the Push Record team, and Marcus Chua and the Wispr Flow team.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Why 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.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  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. The average typing speed is only 40 words per minute, creating a massive I/O 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.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  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. And 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.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:48Speaker 02

  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? We'll also dig into Whisperflow's origin story and the future that appears when thought and creation start to merge.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Here's our conversation with Taneh Kotari.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Reed 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 Reed take it away.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  All right. Again, to echo what Westbound does and the community you guys are part of is extremely important. It's an honor and a delight to be here. And we don't do that many of these live things, so that's part of the bow. So, let's start with the kid version of Taneh, 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?

• 3:11Speaker 00

  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, I'm 4th grade, 9 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 overexaggeration, 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

• 3:55Speaker 00

  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 taking 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 I came back home and then I called one of my friends up. He's in the same class as me. So now we're in fifth grade. And I was like, let's build Jarvis. And he was like, that's a great idea. Let's do that. And so for the next two years, we slept alternate nights.

• 4:39Speaker 00

  I would wait until my parents went to bed, then 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. Uh, 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 a it was a whole roller coaster back then doing it hidden from my parents. But fun childhood memories.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  When, when, when, when, if at all, did they figure out what you were doing?

• 5:14Speaker 00

  So I had to tell my dad when I got that letter from Google and I was like terrified. It's 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. Uh, and so then I I told him parts of it. But I think the whole story I told him maybe when I went to college. It's like, I actually never slept when I said good night to you.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Well, it's a good prep for startups. And speaking of startups, so with Whisper, is that, are you still on the the Iron Man Jarvis mission?

• 5:51Speaker 00

  We're 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 it makes the inner child happy when you find that right mix of your career and making the young you happy. I don't think any other feeling beats that.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  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?

• 6:30Speaker 00

  I was initially really pissed. Because I spent so much, like, I spent two years building this thing, and then 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. And they just took my app down, like, they didn't stop me from doing anything else. And so, over the next, wherever, middle school, high school, seven, eight years there, probably built and shipped fifty, sixty 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.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  And for Whisper, it all came back when my co-founder, now Sahaj, he reached out to me, and he said, "Tanya, I'm leaving my company. You think we must start with something new." And I was like, you know, there's this one thing I've always wanted to build. And I explained this, like, vision to him of a, it's 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 there. And that resonated with both of us, and that was the birth of Whisper.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  So we're always talking about how AI can actually make people feel more human. And so, you know, speaking and voice is like the oldest human technology, older than writing, it's what people have been doing forever. Like, how does that, how does voice matter to the future of computing and technology?

• 8:12Speaker 00

  When 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, you know, 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 little bit. 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. And they should not be subject to this pain.

• 8:55Speaker 00

  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.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  It's interesting, the two people in my life who use voice the most are my seven year old son and my eight 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?

• 9:23Speaker 00

  So when I talk to a lot of people about why dictation, people are like, oh, you know, I I type very fast. It'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 idea is coming out. But what happens when you're writing, typing it out is, 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,

• 10:03Speaker 00

  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 Whisperflow, they didn't talk about how much time it saved them. They felt about how much easier life felt because this cognitive load 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, I'll, 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 and somebody you trust, that is the biggest value I think Whisperflow delivered to people,

• 10:45Speaker 00

  which I wasn't expecting, but something that we learned because that is how every single person described the product.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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 thirty percent, which comes from the mechanical typewriter. So you've seen people go from, frankly, you know, quite skeptical, to instantly obsessed with Whisper. So what do you think creates that voice-pilled, you know, kind of moment? Where suddenly, they realize the obsolescence of the keyboard?

• 11:34Speaker 00

  There's a lot of reasons why people are skeptics. One, again, there's a lot of really fast diapers, who are like, ah, 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 ten years, you know what I'm talking about?

• 11:48Speaker 01

  Ever, yes.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  And, 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.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  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. And 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, 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, 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.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  So, hey, what is the problem that you're just feeling in your life? Do you wake up every day with fifty emails in your inbox? And that's like exhausting for you? Cool, 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 what I call people being voice-pilled. 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 Cursat 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? Keyboard just almost becomes extinct.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  It's less than 5% of what people use. And that, to me, is what true behavior change looks like.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  100%. And are there any specific features or experiences like you, like tracking that metric that that switches, that that gets to that, oh, my gosh, I have now been voice-pilled?

• 13:53Speaker 00

  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 we 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 150 years.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  So I think, Reed, let's skip to the demo. I think this is a really good time to do that.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  OK, great.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  All right. So we've been talking about the transformative power of voice. We'll actually come back to, you know, kind of its impact in AI and much 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. And in this case, a race, voice versus typing. So our competitors tonight are actually colleagues. Tane 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.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  So I'm going to hand each of them a piece of paper. It says the same thing. It is the ChatGPT prompt. And I think Tane wanted to make it. He was like, I got this in the bag. So he's going to drink red wine while he's doing it. It's getting a little cocky over here. Our coworker, Sanasi, has $100 on today. 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. And 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.

• 16:03Speaker 00

  Marcus, what's your typing speed?

• 16:05Speaker 03

  I type usually at 117 words per minute.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Oh, so I sandbagged it.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  Don't open it, don't open it. All right, I'm gonna say, on your marks, get set, go.

• 16:21Speaker 00

  Build a Gantt-style timeline product for a product launch spanning 12 weeks. Phase one is market research, weeks one through three. Phase two is design and prototyping, weeks three through seven, with a two-week overlap. Phase three is development, weeks six through 10. Phase four is testing, refinement, weeks nine through 11. Final phase is launch. Oops. Final phase is launch preparation, weeks 11 through 12. Use different colors for each phase, show dependencies with connecting lines. Highlight the current week, add milestone markers for stakeholder reviews in week four, eight, and 11.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  I didn't even know there were 11 phases.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  So do try this at home.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  I mean, I wanna see. Come on, ChatGPT, make it happen.

• 17:16Speaker 00

  Come on. We gotta, we gotta get some feedback to Sam Altman here. Oh, there you go.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  All right, round of applause for both contestants.

• 17:31Speaker 04

  This 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/build to create your first app.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  So.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  So 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 the environment around us. But 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?

• 18:44Speaker 00

  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. This 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.

• 19:26Speaker 00

  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 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 didn't know that we're 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,

• 20:11Speaker 00

  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 it works every time. But 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.

• 20:55Speaker 00

  Because it's just like one button and it just works.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  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 gonna name any names, might be a little excitable and put too many exclamation points in their emails. And 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?

• 21:28Speaker 00

  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 wirecoding 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, right, it's like, press a button and Whisper works. And he also completed the marathon in like a solid, like, four and a half hours while wirecoding this app. And like, once like some wire fell off and he had to like replug it in.

• 22:11Speaker 00

  And that, to me, when I just saw that, I was just like, this is ridiculous.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  Now I feel bad about myself. I neither wirecoded the app nor did I run the marathon.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, 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.

• 22:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  And, you know, Apple, Google, OpenAI, that's around five or 10%. With Wispr Flow, it jumps to 85%. How did you accomplish that?

• 22:57Speaker 00

  It's 89% now with a new model that we just released.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, Alison. Yes, exactly.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  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 of these tools and you're like, this is all kind of garbage for this specific solution. And we just focused on that.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  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.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  And 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 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 to, 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. And in a world like that, you don't always have displays to verify what you've said.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  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.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  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 peeling 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.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, 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 Wispr 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." Takes the same time to like speak this 30-second prompt, but now it just one-shots it every time.

• 26:01Speaker 00

  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 forths by giving it more context sequentially. You just ramble it out at once.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  I feel like it's also going to be huge for e-commerce because if I'm on an e-commerce website and I'm not going to take the time to type out like, "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.

• 26:59Speaker 00

  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. But the bureaucracy and systems there just make it really hard to challenge the status quo. Like, imagine going into Apple and just saying, "City 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.

• 27:42Speaker 00

  Add a year now. Add a year now.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  Do you think there's, we've obviously talked about there's so many things you gain from speaking, you have 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.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  So what you lose, at times, is the precision. There are times where you really need to craft your words and how they're gonna 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. Some people are great, they're, 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.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  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.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  Awesome.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  So say a little bit about one of the natural questions that a lot of our local audience and obviously our recorded audience would have, which is, okay, look, I get the, all the benefits you've been talking about, like you can do it much more naturally, there'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 we're, you're 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 to this because we've talked about it already, but shared for the audience, like, what does that new office of the, of the future look like, why does it actually work, you know, what, how, how is that kind of voice collision navigated?

• 29:38Speaker 00

  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. What we have seen in some of the offices that are just fully on Whisper today is everybody on their desk has one of these podium mics that comes up to your mouth, and they're just whispering into it. Entire office floor, 100 people, they're just whispering into these little mics. Now, with Wispr Flow, we added this feature so that you can whisper insanely quietly, so the person beside you can't hear what you're saying, and it just still works for this exact reason.

• 30:17Speaker 00

  And the, the way they describe it is like, it almost forms a community, which was so interesting to hear from this, like, group of people in this office who are now just, like, starting to get voice build. That, I think, is the first step in which companies are gonna adopt. And now, whenever we go to a Fortune 500 company, deploy Whisper there, we just give them these mics so that they can use it in their open office. This isn't an anomaly, though. Like, many years ago, there were people inside offices, and you're just taking calls around everybody else. You might have some barriers that, like, give you some noise cancellation, and...

• 30:55Speaker 00

  About twenty, thirty years ago, we all just got used to having phone calls around everybody else, which again wasn't the norm before that. So when you start doing human behavior change in small ways, that leads to societal change happening in bigger waves, which sometimes you can't predict. But that is the one thing like I have personally seen the best companies in the world do. Like Nike made it a normal for people to run outside without being chased by a bear.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  You just have to be faster than the person without the Nike.

• 31:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  Airbnb made it normal to stay in strangers' homes. Zoom made it normal to like work in your pajamas. And those are the companies that truly shift, say like how human society works overall. And when I think about kind of the mission we have with Whisper, it's not just the human change, it's the societal change that comes with it.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  I feel like it's when, you know, when AirPods first were introduced, like in the very beginning, people just thought everyone was like a little crazy walking down the street, talking to themselves. And now it's just like unbelievably normal, a hundred percent. And so where, do you think there's like a tipping point? Like, oh, in five years, voice is going to be everything. Or like, how long does that tipping point take?

• 32:17Speaker 00

  The tipping point can take really long if just left to it. We don't want the tipping point to take that long. So for me,

• 32:29Speaker 00

  the reason we built this team with incredible people, we're all in the office, like pretty much like six days a week, mornings and nights working is because I want to see this happen in the next two years. The next two years, I want this to become a household name. When you go to a cafe and you see somebody talking with their laptop, you're just like, oh, they're just using Whisper. And that is the world we're pushing for. And I do genuinely believe it is a net positive for humanity. And I want to get it in the hands of as many people as fast as possible.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  Do you think there's a change in emotional honesty or creativity? Or sort of does the, does the content of what people say actually change when that friction of typing disappears?

• 33:12Speaker 00

  People get a lot nicer.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  You'd be surprised. So we did this experiment where at this company, we gave it to half the people in the sales team and the other half were still typing.

• 33:25Speaker 00

  The customer said that this was the nicest sales team that they'd interacted with. Because if you're just like typing, it's kind of mechanical, it's unemotional, like you loses the humanity of it, it's more robotic. But when these salespeople were just like voice typing their emails with Whisper, like parts of their personality and their emotions fell through it. And so the customers on the other side felt that they were talking to actual people. And that just had a resounding kind of success for them. And like similarly for customer support. And personally, I've seen that. Like, I'm a bad texter, right? You all likely have a friend who's a bad texter. If you don't, then it's likely you. And I had so many messages in my inbox all the time.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  And with Whisper, the cognitive load goes away. So it was just easier to message back to people. And like, my friends were like, Tanya, what happened? You like suddenly changed and you send us these long messages. And...

• 34:25Speaker 02

  They were like, please go back, stop sending us these long texts.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  No one has explicitly said that yet.

• 34:33Speaker 00

  And I was just very pleasantly surprised to see that and like just see that behavior change within myself. And I've heard that from a number of other people as well. So I think there's some like interesting other behavior changes that are just unintended consequences that we're just starting to see happen.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  Awesome.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Another thing that's interesting in these kind of platform modality interface shifts is that it changes kind of who's advantaged, who's disadvantaged. You know, does a voice-first world start advantaging, you know, extrovert storytellers for most people? You know, the stereotypical extrovert versus introvert, et cetera. How do you see this pattern changing if everyone starts adopting this mode change?

• 35:20Speaker 00

  There might be some of that. But I'll tell you where we're coming from. We're coming from a world where the only entryway to technology is keyboards. There's 10 million people with Parkinson's who can't use them. There are a number of people with ALS, different kinds of disabilities, who genuinely are unable to type. People with dwarfism, their thumbs are too big to press a single key. They can't type on their phones. 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. And then we were talking about kind of the old people who didn't grow up with it, who are doing this.

• 36:05Speaker 00

  And so it makes it a level playing field for all of them. And at that point, if it's like, hey, it makes like extra words like a little better at this, I'm fine taking those odds any day.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  That's awesome. Do you have a final question before I move to that?

• 36:20Speaker 01

  So I guess probably what I'll do is say, do you think, you believe that voice computing will reshape human relationships? Right, and the human-to-human connection?

• 36:36Speaker 00

  I think in a huge way. I think when we started going from speaking with each other like this to going through text and using the minimal number of characters to message another human being. I think there's parts of us that we lost in that. And with this, my hope is if we can start to get more of that personality and all back. Technology is today and always will be a medium for people to communicate with each other. And we just want to make it as easy and simple for that to happen. Where my vision for Whisper is like, it doesn't just communicate your thoughts to the other person, but it can also go a level deeper and understand

• 37:18Speaker 00

  how the other person perceives things and writes things better. For it to be even more understandable to them. Because a lot of time, you say something and somebody else hears something else. And so I think that goes really deep into communication. And that is really like one of the big problems that we are solving.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  I think that's very elegantly said in voice about the importance of voice communication. So let's move to rapid fire.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  I just thought of one very New York question. Which is, I'm from New York, and when you're in New York on the subway, the biggest faux pas is when people listen to music without headphones in. And it's so infuriating, and people do it all the time, and it's so rude. Do you think it's okay if people on the New York City subway whisper in public?

• 38:07Speaker 00

  Let me show you.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 38:09Speaker 00

  This is totally unscripted, by the way.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  It is.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay. So you can whisper extremely quietly. I'm gonna do it here. I'm gonna also like pull this mic up to my mouth, so it's a true test.

• 38:28Speaker 00

  And so you can speak.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  Is that a joke that really went through?

• 38:31Speaker 00

  That would go through.

• 38:33Speaker 02

  Okay, all right, it's official. You can whisper on the New York City subway.

• 38:36Speaker 00

  Try it on your phones, this is not staged.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  But isn't New York supposed to be the city of rudeness?

• 38:43Speaker 02

  Read? New York is one of the greatest cities in the world.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  If you say so.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  We say from San Francisco.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  I know, I was trying, I was trying.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  So, all right, rapid fire.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  Yes, please.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  So, Tane, is there a movie, song, or book that fills you with optimism for the future?

• 39:04Speaker 00

  Siddhartha by Herman Hesse.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Yep, great choice.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  What is a question that you wish people would ask you more often?

• 39:14Speaker 00

  What am I obsessed with right now? Because I feel like that changes time after time. And I'm a very obsessive person, so if I'm obsessed with something, I'm thinking about it always.

• 39:25Speaker 02

  What are you obsessed with right now?

• 39:27Speaker 00

  I'm thinking about getting a bike.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  What kind of bike?

• 39:30Speaker 00

  Motorbike Kawasaki Ninja.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  Alright.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  So I'm gonna get my biking license two weekends from now. And then, much to my fiance's dismay, gonna get a bike.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  Be careful.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I think there's a thing called key man insurance you may want to look into.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  But with that, where do you see progress or momentum outside of your field that inspires you?

• 39:54Speaker 00

  Like, one of my favorite companies that I'm really excited about right now is Boom Supersonic.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:59Speaker 00

  So like, earlier this year, for people who don't know, they actually had the first flight, which was supersonic without the sonic boom. Which is insane, because that was the reason the Concorde never got that. And I've been following this company for the last four-plus years or so, since whenever they started. And I cannot wait to be in one of those planes.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  As an investor, I also want to be in one of those planes. Like, it's possible, San Francisco to Tokyo, four and a half hours.

• 40:29Speaker 00

  That would be insane.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  I do San Francisco to India flights a lot.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  And those would be amazing if it's not seventeen hours.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  So Tane, can you leave us with a final thought on what you think is possible to achieve if everything breaks humanity's way in the next fifteen years? And what's our first step in that direction?

• 40:51Speaker 00

  Okay, so I'll tell you one of like my big motivations for Jarvis and beyond, that's just beyond technology period, is I don't want my kids to grow up in a world where they're stuck to their screens like this all day long. That would be the most depressing thing to me. And so, what I want to see in the world is, technology doesn't pull you into screens. Lets you be a lawmore present. And one day, I'll walk down on the street, there's nobody stuck on their screens. Everybody's just looking up, enjoying the view around. Listening to the birds chirping, whatever they want. You likely have still an AI in your ear.

• 41:33Speaker 00

  But at least your eyes are not glued away to something else. And...

• 41:41Speaker 00

  The biggest thing that I think like it's a nice crowd of investors to do is invest in the deep tech founders, invest in the founders who are building technologies in ways of interaction that are hard, that are building new hardware that is hard. I keep shitting on Apple, but like genuinely, guys, like this is 17 generations old. We need something better now because it's going to require a lot of people working incredibly hard for the next 10 years to break away from this world we're stuck in right now. We're always scrolling on TikTok and Instagram on to just something else, which is much greener pastures.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  I hope so, too.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  So let's give Tanaya a round of applause.

• 42:28Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me here. This was amazing.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And hopefully we've helped some more people get voice billed.

• 42:34Speaker 00

  Let's make it happen.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  All right. Thanks.

• 42:36Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  Possible is produced by Palette Media. It's hosted by Ari Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Tanasi Delos, Katie Sanders, Spencer Strasmore, Imo Zoo, Trent Barboza, and Tafadzwa Nirmurundwe.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  And a big thanks to Sean Mendy, Amanda Iraziri, and the Westbound Equity Partners team, David Stiepleman and the Sixth Street team, Isabella Sakafi and the Florabella Studios team, Marshall Potter and the Push Record team, and last but certainly not least, Marcus Schwa and the Whisperflow team.

• 43:12Speaker 05

  This podcast is supported by Google. Hey folks, Stephen Johnson here, co-founder of Notebook LM. As an author, I've always been obsessed with how software could help organize ideas and make connections. So we built Notebook LM as an AI-first tool for anyone trying to make sense of complex information. Upload your documents and Notebook LM instantly becomes your personal expert, uncovering insights and helping you brainstorm. Try it at notebooklm.google.com.