Speaking Is Faster
In 2018 Sherry Ruan, Jacob Wobbrock and colleagues compared the two ways most of us put text into a phone: the touch keyboard and speech recognition. Participants copied short messages on an iPhone, in English and in Mandarin Chinese, once by typing and once by speaking.
Speech won clearly. In English it was 2.93 times faster than the keyboard: 153 words per minute against 52. In Mandarin it was 2.87 times faster. Speech also made fewer errors along the way (a corrected error rate of 5.30% against 11.22%), though it left slightly more errors in the final text (1.30% against 0.79%).
Two cautions. This was a lab study, with people copying given sentences, not thinking aloud about their day. And the speed came from recognising speech into text; a voice note that stays a recording skips that step entirely, and with it the errors.
Saying It Aloud Helps You Remember
There is a second, quieter benefit. In eight experiments, Colin MacLeod and colleagues at the University of Waterloo showed what they call the production effect: words people said aloud while studying were remembered better than words they read silently. The effect appeared even when people only mouthed the words without making a sound.
The detail matters. The effect showed up when some items were said aloud and others were read silently in the same list: saying them aloud made those items stand out. So it is not that speaking always beats reading. It is that what you choose to say aloud becomes more distinctive, and so easier to recognise later.
When To Write
- When you will look for it again. Text can be searched and skimmed in seconds. A recording has to be played.
- Lists, names, numbers, links. A shopping list or a phone number is faster to read than to listen to.
- In quiet places. An office, a train carriage, a waiting room.
- Short things. For one line, typing takes about as long as starting a recording.
When To Speak
- When your hands are busy. Walking, cooking, at the top of a climb with gloves on.
- Long, unformed thoughts. An idea you haven’t worked out yet comes out more easily spoken than typed with two thumbs.
- When tone matters. How you felt about something is in your voice, not only in your words.
The Best Of Both
Record the voice note, then write one line above it saying what it is: “Idea for the November trip”, “What the plumber said”, “Talk outline, first try”. The line is what you will skim and search later; the recording is the detail when you need it.
This matters more in an app that keeps things private. Tuttodì does not transcribe recordings: transcription would mean sending your voice to a service or running a speech model, and the app does neither. So search finds the line you wrote, not the words you said. One line is enough.
Voice Notes In Tuttodì
Tap the microphone in the editor, or hold the app icon and choose “Record” to start straight away. There is no time limit, the recording keeps going with the screen off, and it plays back right inside the note, with its waveform. Like every photo and note, it stays on your phone.
Sources
- Ruan, S., Wobbrock, J. O., Liou, K., Ng, A., & Landay, J. A. (2018). Comparing speech and keyboard text entry for short messages in two languages on touchscreen phones. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 1(4), 1–23. doi:10.1145/3161187
- MacLeod, C. M., Gopie, N., Hourihan, K. L., Neary, K. R., & Ozubko, J. D. (2010). The production effect: Delineation of a phenomenon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 36(3), 671–685. doi:10.1037/a0018785