Your keyboard does most of the talking when you work remotely. Here's what changes when your voice takes over.
You're a product manager who works from home three days a week. Your day splits between Slack, email, Google Docs, and Zoom. Most of your work output is written words.
You're at the kitchen counter with coffee, and three things from yesterday are still rattling around in your head. You grab your phone, open Notes, and hold the Steno button. Thirty seconds later you have a clean list of what's carrying over. You haven't even sat down at your desk yet.
Your team does async standups in Slack. Typing these out always takes longer than it should because you overthink the phrasing. You hold the hotkey and just talk through what you did yesterday, what you're doing today, and what's blocked. Steno drops it into the channel. You read it once, fix one word, and send. Forty-five seconds instead of five minutes of editing.
"Yesterday I finished the onboarding flow spec and sent it to design for review. Today I'm going through the Q3 roadmap feedback from the leadership team. No blockers right now."
Yesterday I finished the onboarding flow spec and sent it to design for review. Today I'm going through the Q3 roadmap feedback from the leadership team. No blockers right now.
You have six emails that need real responses, not one-liners. The kind where you need to explain a decision or give context. Opening each one and typing feels heavy. Instead you read the email, hold the hotkey, and talk through your response while the context is fresh. Three minutes and all six are sent. This used to take twenty.
"Hey Marcus, I looked at the vendor proposals and I think we should go with Option B. The upfront cost is higher but their API documentation is significantly better, which will save us engineering time during integration. Happy to walk through the comparison on a call if you want."
Hey Marcus, I looked at the vendor proposals and I think we should go with Option B. The upfront cost is higher but their API documentation is significantly better, which will save us engineering time during integration. Happy to walk through the comparison on a call if you want.
You're on a product review call. You have Google Docs open next to Zoom. Every time someone says something worth capturing, you hold the hotkey and speak it. "Sarah wants to push the beta date to March 15. Engineering needs another sprint for the API migration." No frantic typing, no missing context while you try to keep up.
Your VP asked for a one-page brief on the pricing experiment results. Normally you'd stare at a blank doc for ten minutes trying to figure out the first sentence. Instead you just start talking. You dictate the whole thing in about four minutes of speaking, then spend ten minutes editing it into shape. The hard part, getting thoughts out of your head and onto the page, took four minutes instead of forty.
Fourteen unread threads. Some need a sentence, some need a paragraph. You work through them one at a time: read, hold hotkey, respond. The thread about the design review gets a three-sentence reply. The one about the sprint planning conflict gets a longer explanation. You're done in twelve minutes. Typing these out would have eaten the rest of your afternoon.
Before you close the laptop, you dictate tomorrow's to-do list into your notes app. Three priorities, two follow-ups, one thing you promised someone you'd send. Fifteen seconds. You close the laptop and you're actually done, not carrying a mental list into dinner.
Tomorrow morning, dictate just your standup update instead of typing it. One message. See how it feels to talk instead of compose.
Pick three emails that need real responses. Read each one, then hold the hotkey and talk through your reply. Time yourself. You'll be surprised.
Before you close the laptop, dictate tomorrow's three priorities into your notes app. Takes fifteen seconds. You'll start the next day clearer.