Losing Our Voices to the Machine

When I graduated high school in 1989, two machines sat side by side on the desks around me: the brand-new electronic typewriter and the Commodore 64 running DOS. Both promised the future. Both still smelled of plastic and ozone. One clattered with every keystroke… the other blinked back at you with a green cursor on a black void.

That moment sits right at the hinge of history… where society tipped from speaking and handwriting as our primary means of communication into this odd new world of typing. We didn’t know it then, but the keyboard would win, and fast.

For me, typing has always felt unnatural. I’ve struggled with it my whole life. I remember a friend in the 2000s who had Parkinson’s… typing was torture for him. He used a program called Viavoice. I can still hear him calling out “Wake up!” to the machine, trying to wrestle speech back into the loop. It often caught me off guard, partly because I was facing the same frustrations he was… I just never admitted it. Because there’s always someone worse off than you, right?

Yet deep down I knew: typing was never designed to be natural. And after decades of smashing at keyboards, sometimes I still want to throw mine out the window.

The strange thing is… society normalised typing in just over a century. That’s nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of years we’ve had voices, mouths, tone, and breath. No wonder so many of us still feel the friction.

From Voice to Keyboard

• 50,000 years ago: We spoke, sang, told stories. Voice was the first technology.

• 3200 BCE: Writing appears, sacred and slow. Elites scribbled… everyone else still spoke.

• 1450s: Gutenberg’s press. Writing spreads, but speech still ruled.

• 1860s: Typewriters enter offices. Bureaucracy loves them.

• 1920s-40s: Typewriters become mandatory. Dictation fades.

• 1960s-80s: Computers arrive. Typing is no longer optional.

• 1990s: Email rebrands typing as “professional talk”.

• 2000s: SMS, MSN, iChat, early smartphones. Suddenly whole friendships exist only in text.

• 2010s: Apps everywhere. Text becomes oxygen.

• 2020s: Speech-to-text finally matures, but keyboards still dominate work culture.

Messaging Apps and the COVID Jolt

Fast forward to 2020. The pandemic slammed the world online. Overnight, Teams, WhatsApp, Webex, Zoom, and every other messaging app became our new front doors. Software companies scrambled in a fierce race to deliver the “winning” solution, patching features post haste as the world demanded connection.

For many, it was the first time they’d ever lived their daily lives inside messaging apps, video calls, and chat threads. At first it felt urgent, alive. Cameras on. Chat buzzing. We were reinventing presence through screens… finding ways to stitch back a sense of togetherness.

But as months wore on, the slide began.

• Cameras off.

• Chat replacing eye contact.

• Voice flattened into background noise.

The irony? The very tools that gave us presence became tools of absence. We showed up without showing up.

Where This Leaves Us

Now we’re caught in a paradox… Speech recognition is everywhere… in our phones, in our cars, even baked into workplace apps. And yet at work, policies and compliance rules often blunt the very tools that could free us. In my own job in IT, I can dictate text in some systems, but I can’t paste from one screen to another. It’s maddening. Like being given a bicycle but told not to use the pedals.

And for me, it’s never just been about policy. Prior to being diagnosed with ADHD in 2023, I’d often mentally abuse myself for having ten thumbs that just couldn’t operate a keyboard. Well… they could, but only if I locked myself away in a completely quiet space, free from distraction, noise, or even the faintest excuse to stop. Typing left me speechless in the worst sense... because it felt like trying to talk through my fingers. I'm mean seriously, are their vocal cords in your finger tips ?

At times it felt like being handed the tools of a detail surgeon or neurologist… and told: here you go, use this hammer and chisel, whack away as best you can, and come back when you’ve managed to bash out something that sounds like Shakespeare. That mismatch between expectation and reality was crushing.

About a year after my diagnosis, I asked my psychiatrist a question that had been playing on my mind me:

Could I have had dyslexia all along? We spoke about it many times. We never tested the hypothesis, but we agreed to focus on the neurodivergent condition I’d already been diagnosed with. ADHD became my doorway to deeper self-understanding. And through that journey… which will likely stretch on for the rest of my life… we’ve explored autism too, a close cousin to ADHD and dyslexia. Each of these interrelated conditions sits in its own place on the neurodivergent spectrum.

That’s why the keyboard feels like such a mismatch to me. It’s not just an unnatural interface for humanity… it’s a daily collision point between my neurology and a tool that was never designed with me in mind.

A Possible Future (with AI in the Room)

The irony is that just as typing has worn us down, we’re standing at the doorway of an era that could restore what we lost. AI is already slipping into the cracks: bots that join meetings, transcribe conversations, and turn them into tidy notes, tasks, and actions. Suddenly we don’t have to split ourselves in two… half listening, half scribbling, and later trying to decipher our own handwriting.

For the first time, machines can actually listen better than most of us can. They don’t get tired, distracted, or biased toward their own perspective. They can hold memory across months of conversations. They’re fluent in languages we’ll never master in a lifetime. And they can do the basics—capturing, summarising, translating… with more accuracy and speed than any of us ever could.

That’s not the end of conversation… it’s the beginning of freeing it. If the machine handles the scaffolding, we’re left to bring the one thing no keyboard, no algorithm, no automation can replicate: the human presence in the moment.

Maybe this is the real pivot. We spent a century bending ourselves to fit the keyboard. Now the tools can finally bend to fit us.

Closing Thought

We don’t have to throw the keyboard out the window. But we can stop worshipping it as the only serious interface. We can design tools that make voice as natural in the workplace as it is in life. We can stop hiding behind blank screens and muted microphones. We can give presence… and tone… the space they’ve always deserved.

Because long before keyboards, before apps, before machines… our voices carried us. And maybe it’s time they did again.