Oct 3, 2024 3 min read Interesting

Asymmetric Communication Speeds

And why sending voice notes might come accross as a bit arrogant.

We have a throughput problem

Considering Words Per Minute (WPM), according to google, on average, people can:

Speak @ 110 - 150 WPM
Listen @ 110 - 150 WPM ( but you can train yourself to increase this )
Type @ 52 - 60 WPM
Read @ 238 - 260 WPM

I'm sure you've felt this yourself. Typing not keeping up with your thoughts, or that frustrating feeling when you want someone to just get to the point, wishing you could x1.5 (or even x1.75/x2 a person's real time speaking speed, like you do a podcast/audiobook).

I find it interesting, the slowest output (typing) is paired with the fastest input (reading). And, that speaking is x2 - x3 faster than typing, which brings me to...

Why voice notes suck

There I said it. I can't be alone in thinking this, can I?

We've all been there, working away/doing something, and a voice note arrives. So now you are stuck listening for a few minutes to what could have been a simple text message that would take only seconds to read. It's not just inconvenient—it's inefficient. And what if there was key information in the note like a phone number, now you have to listen to the whole thing again to transcribe the details yourself. Ugh!

Look, I get it. It's sometimes it's just way easier to ramble into your (micro)phone while you're multitasking or when you've got a complex idea that you are thinking about or that would just be a pain to type out. It also lets you throw in all those vocal cues that text just can't capture in text, which can sometimes be a critical part of the message... but.

So by switching to a voice note, on an otherwise text based communication (e.g. Slack or WhatsApp), you are forcing the recipient to spend 110% - 170% more time to process your message vs a text message, and to compound things - you only took about 40% of the time to make that voice note, vs typing it!

Arrogant. adjective. Having or revealing an exaggerated sense of one's own importance or abilities.

So that sucks.

Voice to Text as a solution

Voice to Text it's excellent now, and built into most OSs for free. Voice to Text, enables you to have the highest output throughput (@ 110+ WPM), and the receiver gets highest input by reading it (238 WPM). Win-Win.

So next time you have a long message to communicate (or even just a large amount of text to write), try Voice to Text. It lets you get the idea down fast, but gives you the chance to then edit that idea, to make it easy to consume. (It can be quite humbling the first time you do it).

You could even dictate to a LLM and get the AI to clean up your ramblings into a coherent form, saving you time and still allowing the receiver to skim it/copy and paste/quote reply/use their own LLM to reply etc.

I've been trying to use Voice to Text more in my day to day (part of this blog post was written this way), and it does help. Give it a try!

But what about automatic transcripts?

Some tools do this, run voice to text for you, automatically and then show the transcript alongside the audio.

But, it's not much better than x2'ing the playback speed (if your brain can cope with that). You might be able to jam more words into your brain per minute by increasing the playback speed; but the quality of the output tends to still be quite low, filler words, lack of formatting, lack of structure, meandering thoughts etc all make the result less valuable than a crafted text based message.

Let's communicate better, faster, more effectively

So, the next time you're tempted to send a voice note, or have a large amount of text to communicate; remember you have the options of Voice to Text and the power of a well crafted message. It’s a small shift that can have a big impact on productivity and respect for each other's time.

Give it a try! Your recipients (and future self) will thank you. After all, a little extra thought and time now can lead to a lot more clarity later!