We have hit the crazy summer season where JC will be bouncing around a bit more randomly than normal, and newsletters might become somewhat intermittent. Rest assured, much is going on behind the scenes at the Jolly Contrarian. Including the rollout of a new consulting arm!

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Wither voice recognition?

I’m trying something new for this post, and that is using the Wispr Flow voice recognition application for dictating rather than writing.

This does the useful but unglamorous job of voice recognition (a technology that is well developed) and overlaying some AI pattern matching to fix up and properly punctuate dictation. JC’s nasal mumbling comes out looking more presentable.

For those who never learned to touch type or who regularly input significant data on a mobile device, voice recognition should be a real productivity opportunity.

It is odd it has not caught on more quickly to date.

Using AI to overcome some of the obvious limitations of dictation (that includes making errors, ums, ahs, and contradicting yourself: that is to say, applying a small amount of limited editorial control) is an ideal application for AI. It saves a good deal of incremental time. It is obviously testable and correctable at the time, so little or no risk of hallucination.

Wispr Flow works pretty well. You can train it to correct my annoying verbal and linguistic tics. As do all lawyers, I tend to overcomplicate my sentences. It would be great to train AI Assistant to take my turgid rambling output and rectify it by reference to specific rules I specify.

For example, “convert all nominalisations into direct verbal constructions”. “Replace all weak verbs with strong ones and avoid equivocal language like I think that — and this seems to be —”. These features help me eliminate awkward aspects of my natural speech.

Getting the rules just right is important, but you can overdo it. Sometimes the output is nothing like what I said and feels generic and “sloppy”.

It includes a handy feature: you can select your output text, and it will polish it according to your preferred rules. This will directly challenge Grammarly and other spell‑checking applications.

All this does prompt the question: why isn’t voice recognition more prevalent? Accurate voice recognition is hardly new. Maybe these tools will send it over the top.

But the ongoing deprecation of office workspaces has something to do with it too.

After all, forty years ago, voice recognition was the norm. We didn’t call it that: we called it “dictation”. We didn’t use tech—beyond cassette recorders. The intelligence was real: a human typist.

In hindsight, having one employee dictating and another typing, and the inevitable iterative process between them to finalise a document, looks highly labour-intensive.

Collapsing that down to a single employee composing and typing was less so—once the office manager [for younger readers, that’s the chief operating officer—Ed] got over the idea that “we don’t pay lawyers to type”.

But dictating without having to type is surely quickest of all. So where is it? Why isn’t Wispr Flow eating the world?

One factor may be the concurrent changes in the physical workplace that came with new technology: dedicated offices gave way to shared offices, then cubicles, then open‑plan spaces, and finally hot‑desking.

Over that time we became quieter and more timid. Noise is distracting, though on a busy trading floor it is a fairly pleasant, comforting hubbub. Speaking aloud can feel slightly embarrassing.

At the same time, dictation — indeed, all oral communication — has deprecated sharply. Desk phones have disappeared, replaced by Teams and Zoom. Phone calls — once ad-hoc, bilateral, analogue affairs — have given way to prearranged online meetings. Calling someone out of the blue, without arranging it in advance, is now the height of rudeness.

This, incidentally, is one advantage—probably the only advantage, beyond the saved ground rental—of our post-COVID generational shift towards remote working: suddenly we all have our private spaces back, and voice recognition is a realistic prospect.

Local and distant networks

The above touches on the crux of the digital divide: since digital networks arrived in our working lives — the world-wide web broke its academic borders in the early 90s — the nature of our networks has changed.

Networks in the pre-digital era

The pre-digital era was based upon small, rich, accretive local networks. These networks were multilateral: they involved people interacting, in person, in the workplace, or in physical meetings. The longer such a network lasted the better it got, as relationships formed, ways of working evolved and “institutional capital” accumulated. Hence these were rich, accumulative networks.

They were augmented by a thin layer of what I will call remote networks, which only got used were the local ones weren’t suitable. These these could be electronic — phone, fax, telex or telephone — or physical — snail mail or courier — but in any case were mainly bilateral in nature, and didn’t have the quite same “capital accumulating” nature.

Building relationships was central to business in the pre-digital era.

Local networks in the pre-digital era

Local physical networks had distinct advantages over remote ones. They were immediate and multilateral — people who were on hand could convene quickly —the communications were rich — not just “text” but “speech”: imbued with relationships, institutional knowledge, body language and context — multilateral — as many people as you needed could attend — and instant — but at the same time informal: dialogue was not systematically captured, logged, audited, or recorded, allowing candour, correction and the safe removal of faux pas, irrelevance and error before creating any formal minute or record of the meeting — and free — in the sense that there was no incremental internal cost to having already-engaged employees meet together. (Employee cost attribution even today is minimal; in 1990 it was non-existent) since the employees were already on the payroll.

Only where a physical meeting was not possible, would you opt for a remote communication. These were comparatively poor — usually bilateral, and at best (phone communication) conveying a fraction of the information of an in-person meeting; telex and fax even less so — or significantly delayed — telex and fax might take hours, mail correspondence days — and in any case incrementally expensive. Telephone and fax costs, postage and courier were meaningful costs per communication. Unlike labour costs, these were not baked in, and could be specifically accounted for.

Therefore before the world wide web every business — rightly — would prefer the local rich, free networks available to it — over remote, poor, expensive bilateral networks.

We organised ourselves accordingly. Firms organised into offices and branches, where people with a need to quickly interact could do so. Offices organised into compact districts where one could easily meet customers, counterparties, advisors and competitors. We built complex, rich, local, interlocking networks. We built relationships, reputations and trust. Much of the strength of the network was implicit — the shared history, knowledge, and common interests.

By contrast, it was hard to build reputation and trust over a telephone line, and impossible by fax.

So, these were the critical features of a local network: immediacy, speed, convencience, informality, memory, trust, and subtlety. These features are hard — impossible, really — to quantify.

But before 1990, not everything in business needed to be quantified. There was a costs to doing business, and that was that. The wealth of local networks is “illegible”. You can’t see it in the financial accounts. It may was well not be there.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t there, however. So:

Local, physical, rich, fast, cheap, invisible networks good.

Remote, electronic, impoverished, slow, expensive, visible networks: bad.

Networks in the post digital era

When the World Wide Web burst onto the public consciousness in around 1993 — I remember attending a seminar about it — everything changed, but nothing did.

Local networks didn’t change at all.

Everything changed about remote ones.

Digital, not analogue

Remote networks became now digital, not analogue. Whereas analogue communications occupied physical space and took time, and where they could be copied at all, quickly lost fidelity, digital communications occupied no space, could be copied, recorded or moved over any distance instantly and at zero marginal cost.

Whereas analogue communications had to be embedded in a “substrate” — paper, mainly — digital data needs no substrate. It travels unaccompanied.

Infinite audit

While digital solved the problem of incremental cost and created an “opportunity”: infinite audit.

As we will see, where there is “infinite audit” you no longer need “trust”: you have all the receipts.

But trust turns out to be quite important. Everything, always, being on the record has a chilling effect on candid communication. Things you might once have said are no longer said. This can be a boon and a bane.

There is one fork of the information revolution still cantering towards a fully trustless network: crypto.

High bandwidth

As the physical network has built out and chips have grown faster, bandwidth has exploded. In 1990 it took ten minutes over a 56k dial-up modem to download a day’s worth of email. In 2026 we can stream virtual reality to a mobile device in the scottish highlands.

Multilateral

In a distributed digital network, everyone is online — connected, and able to send and receive — all the time. Because communications are instant, costless and copied with no loss of fidelity, digital remote networks can be multilateral: we can quickly convene an all-hands video conference.

Before the internet, remote networks — phones, faxes and letters — were a poor relation.They were expensive, slow, of poor quality, and cussedly bilateral.

Now the remote networks are fantastic. They are fully audited, instantaneous, high-bandwidth, free and multilateral.

Not only do they outperform the analog remote networks in every possible regard, they seem also to outperform the rich local networks.

COVID as a live-fire experiment

For the longest time, Chief Operating Officers around the world [for older readers, that’s the office manager—Ed] wondered about the stubborn cost of maintaining an office in the CBD. They had systematically rolled back employee benefits — “bring your own device” is one thing: but even for McKinsey, “bring your own premises” seemed a step too far.

Then came COVID, and we were all bounced into trying it whether we liked it or not. That live fire experiment ended more than 4 years ago, but things have not yet gone back to normal.

There is an odd confluence: this suits many employees — especially us older ones, who quite like working out of the box room — and it rather suits the office managers, as it gives scope for downsizing premises — but you might wonder whether it rather misses the point about what is so good about rich local networks.

I might return to the question of rich local networks and poor distant networks. All complex systems finds their own configuration, and if we participants don’t like where it ends up, all we can do is change our own behavior and see if that corrects it.

If we prefer distant networks over local ones in our daily activities; if we accept the premise that cost, convenience, and auditability outweigh the value of slowly built relationships, trust, and wisdom, we should not to complain when the system treats us poorly.

Wispr Flow redux

Just wrapping up with Wispr Flow. Interestingly, the longer I wrote this newsletter, the less I relied on Wispr Flow, though I’m back to using it now for this closing section. I’m not sure whether this reflects a preference for typing or simply familiarity.

Wispr Flow has a neat “polishing” function it does not depend on voice recognition. You can apply it to any text you’re editing, and you can also create your own rules and AI prompts for it.

For example, I was exasperated at first that Wispr Flow did not handle “smart” punctuation (curly quotes and so on): I am a bit anal retentive about curly quotes, en-dashes and thing like that — but you can set a polishing prompt to convert everything to them.

It strikes me this is how we should be using AI: not to replace human effort in toto, but rather to take away the boring faff of interacting online every day — getting typing and punctuation right.

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