Interesting, I get so many "speech messages" in WhatsApp, nobody is really writing anymore. Its annoying. WhatsApp even has a transcript feature to put it back to text.

Personally I block anyone who does that.

For chat apps, once you've got the conversation thread open, typing is pretty easy.

I think the more surprising thing is that people don't use voice to access deeply nested features, like adding items to calendars etc which would otherwise take a lot of fiddly app navigation.

I think the main reason we don't have that is because Apple's Siri is so useless that it has singlehandedly held back this entire flow, and there's no way for anyone else to get a foothold in smartphone market.

Google Assistant is/was pretty good...for Google apps. It's useless for anything else. The new Gemini powered version is actually a regression imo

I have fat fingers, I always dictate into the phone if I need to send a message longer than 2-3 words.

Those are applications, not interfaces. No one controls those applications with their voices, they use buttons, either touch or mechanical.

Just because you don't doesn't mean other people aren't. It's pretty handy to be able to tell Google to turn off the hallway light from the bedroom, instead of having to get out of bed to do that.

They talk to other humans on those apps, not the computer. I've noticed less dictation over time in public but that's just anecdotal. I never use voice when a keyboard is available.