Keyboards Going the Way of the Fax Machine?
How Voice-to-Text is About to Reshape Commercial Real Estate Communication
Last week I caught up with an old friend - a Foresight Director at one of the global agencies. Over lunch, we found ourselves reminiscing about the technology we inherited when we started our careers. The bulky monitors, the shared drives that crashed every Thursday, the printers that jammed on the day you needed them most.
I told him a story I hadn't thought about in years. Early in my career, I made the executive decision to remove the fax number from my business card. My team boss took the opportunity to give me grief for it. Calling me out and making a show of it on the open-plan office floor.
What he didn't know - and what I wasn't about to tell him - was that the company had already consolidated every fax machine in the building. The single unit that survived had been quietly tucked behind the main reception desk, gathering dust. Every person on our team was walking around with a number on their business card that had either been disconnected or went through to a machine nobody could find, in a place nobody visited, doing a job nobody needed... And for the record, a fax was not sent to our team in the following four years.
That conversation got me thinking about something we don't talk about enough in commercial real estate: the intersection of the software and hardware we rely on every day, and what both look like twelve months from now.
Now, I’ll ask the deliberately provocative question…
Do You Still Use Your Keyboard for Everything?
If you find that question odd, let me be candid - you may soon find yourself calling out the new generation about their keyboard etiquette, only to realise you've become the team boss calling someone out for dropping the fax number.
At this point, allow me to introduce you to Whisper Flow. You can thank me later.
Voice-to-text is evolving at a speed that should have your attention. Tools like Whisper Flow are changing the relationship between how we think and how that thinking reaches the page. But I can already hear the old guard chiming in: "Voice-to-text has been around for years, Leon. What's new?"
Technically, they're correct. So let me take you back.
The Original Voice-to-Text Pipeline
Picture this. The old skool agent pops down to Berry Brothers with a handful of documents and a few printed photographs. After letting a bottle of rouge breathe for approximately four seconds, he settles into a corner and delivers a long, sprawling voice recording onto tape. That's the voice bit.
The tape, along with some wine-stained annotations, would then be handed to Deirdre. Deirdre would go to work, headphones on, foot pedal down, typing the whole thing out, interpreting the mumbles, deciphering the handwriting, and somehow producing a coherent document by morning. That's the text bit.
Voice-to-text, circa 1998. It worked. It was just spectacularly inefficient.
So What's Changed?
This is where the software evolution becomes genuinely interesting, and where AI tools like Whisper Flow earn their place on your desktop.
AI-powered voice-to-text is not simply a faster version of Deirdre (with apologies to Deirdre, who was excellent). Traditional transcription software has been available for years, and most of us gave up on it after the third time it turned "break clause" into "brake claws" or annotated every umm and arhh.
The AI evolution is fundamentally different. The software ignores your stuttering. It interprets your post-lunch slurring. It takes learnings from what you've said before and delivers your voice into text that actually sounds like you wrote it.
This will make reliance on the keyboard less and less important. We may well see it slowly go the way of the fax machine - not disappearing overnight, but gradually becoming the thing hidden at the back of your desk that nobody talks about.
Why This Matters Now
Here's what makes me confident this shift is real and not just another technology talking point.
We are already seeing a growing frustration with AI-generated content across commercial real estate. Reports, market commentary, pitch documents - when someone simply opens ChatGPT, feeds it a lazy prompt with no personalisation, the output reads like it was written by nobody in particular. The tone is flat. The voice is generic. Readers can smell it immediately.
Voice-to-text software represents the pendulum swinging back. It allows you to inject your personality, your tone, your context and your experience back into written communication - while still benefiting from AI's ability to clean, structure, refine and deiver at speed.
That's not a small thing. That might be the whole thing.
The Bifurcation of Written Communication in CRE
So where does this take us in practice? My view is that we're heading towards a clear split in how written communication works across the industry. The triage will depend on what is being communicated and why. Specifically, what role the author's voice plays in the value of the content.
Fact-based communication - building specifications, lease summaries, compliance documentation - generative AI can happily carry the load here. The reader needs the facts delivered clearly and accurately. It doesn't matter if there's no author character coming through. As long as the text has been proofed and the data is correct, we're all good. Crack on.
Opinion-based communication - market commentary, client advisory notes, pitch narratives, thought leadership - this is where the author's context, credibility and voice are essential. A market update that reads like it was written by a machine is a market update that gets skimmed and forgotten. This is precisely where voice-to-text, aided by AI tools like Whisper Flow, becomes not just useful but necessary.
The professionals who recognise this split early and adjust their workflow accordingly will have a genuine arbitrage opportunity. They'll produce fact-based content faster than their competitors while simultaneously delivering opinion-based content that sounds unmistakably human and earned.
Where Does This Leave Your Keyboard?
I'm not suggesting you throw it out tomorrow. But I am suggesting that the tools you reach for first when communicating are about to change, and the change may come faster than most people expect.
The fax machine didn't announce its retirement. Nobody sent a memo. One day it was central to every transaction, the next it was the off-colour bit furniture behind reception. The keyboard won't vanish quite as dramatically, but its role in how we communicate professionally is already shifting.
The question worth sitting with is this: when the next generation walks in and asks why you're still typing everything out manually, will you have a good answer - or will you be the one defending a fax number that doesn't connect to anything?
