Lisa Peyton

Talking vs. Typing: Culture vs. Efficiency If you want to go faster, talk. If you want to fit in, type. That’s the tension at the heart of the new debate around voice computing. Advocates of speaking out loud to our devices make a strong case: it’s faster, more natural, and frees us from the tiny prison of the keyboard. Experiments show people can speak two or three times faster than they can type, with fewer mistakes. But here’s the rub: do you really want your co-workers, subway seatmate, or spouse to hear the raw stream of consciousness you’d normally keep behind a screen? Typing is discreet. It lets you filter thoughts before they escape into the air. Nobody has to overhear your shopping list, half-baked draft, or Slack message to your boss. In other words, typing is culturally polite. Speaking is technically efficient. There are other subtle dynamics too. Voice input can feel performative, even invasive, in shared spaces. It makes private moments public. It can broadcast your anxieties, your typos, and your “ummms” to anyone within earshot. So the question is less about technology and more about etiquette. The tools work. The question is: do we? As voice computing improves, we’ll keep bumping into this friction between speed and social fit. Maybe the future brings whispered microphones, silent speech tech (an emerging field of research where devices pick up neuromuscular signals from your jaw and throat when you silently form words), or cultural norms that shift toward out-loud computing. Until then, it’s a matter of personal choice I suppose. Which side do you land on: the efficiency of speaking, or the cultural ease of typing?

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Maintaining the Scholarly Record Many academics understand the value of DOIs (digital object identifiers) as an essential scholarly infrastructure. Journals submit their metadata to Crossref, so the DOIs know where to link to the articles. But what happens when a journal moves to a new website? While the DOIs never change, they need to be updated, so they take people to the right webpage. That’s where maintaining DOIs comes in. Updating more than 900 DOIs from 87 volumes (years) of a journal, each with a new URL, takes systematic thinking and fine-detail accuracy. One wrong digit can mean people cannot find an article. This helps ensure researchers can find, cite, and share these articles. It may have only taken a few hours of focused work, but it feels good to complete this project for my client.

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Just the free version of Claude can fix a 7,000 line program code better than ChatGPT Plus. I have admittedly resisted for fear of bookmarking 30 different AI assistants, but this is a game changer. Answers come in seconds with little or no compile errors.

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Putting this report together has been a highlight so far for me in early 2026! It’s so fascinating to hear straight from the source some of the key industry insights and trends that help us do the work we do. 🫶🏻

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Great investigative piece by Nate Sanford for Cascade PBS and KNKX Public Radio, using public records requests to show how local governments are really using AI. https://lnkd.in/gWdqHHQr

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