Part 1 of The End of Everything
I am over typing.
I dictate everything now. This article. My client briefs. My messages. Even the prompt that kicked off the research behind what you are about to read, I spoke it into existence and then thought: even this feels slow.
Last week I needed supplements. Not complicated stuff. Magnesium, NMN, Omega 3, Resveratrol, a few others my blood work flagged. Ten different websites. Four separate deliveries. Three of them from the same suburb. I spent more time switching between browser tabs than I did deciding what I actually needed.
It felt like sending a facsimile. Circa 1995.
Same thing with food. I am a chemical-free, organic nut. (Why waste time putting food in your body that is not optimal? Life is short.) But sourcing it means four different shops, because the mainstream supermarkets only get you halfway there. The butcher for grass-fed. The market for seasonal produce. The health food store for everything the other two cannot stock. A separate run for the stuff you can only get online.
All of this, the browsing, the switching, the importing, the exporting, the logging in and logging out, parking — it is archaic. It is the digital equivalent of standing at a fax machine watching paper feed through, one agonising page at a time.
And I thought: this is what changes.
Not in some distant future. Now.
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Voice Kills the Scroll
The better AI gets, and it is getting extraordinary fast, the less anyone will pull out their phone to browse. You will talk.
“Hey, order dinner for six tonight. One is lactose intolerant, organic where possible, budget under $200. Done.”
No app. No feed. No scroll. Voice-first is not a feature upgrade. It is a behavioural revolution.
I only prompt by voice now. I dictate my articles, my strategy documents, voice notes (much nicer than text).
HOW TRUST IS COMMUNICATED
Last week in London, I dined with two of Simon Squibb’s leaders — Jack Whettingsteel (CoFounder, HelpBnk) and Jonny Davies (Head of Investment, Dream Tree Ventures). We talked about hacks. Their love of voice, versus typing. Jonny has Wispr Flow as a button on his mouse.
And I am not an outlier. OpenAI just spent $6.5 billion acquiring Jony Ive’s firm, io Products, to build audio-first AI device hardware specifically designed to replace the screen addiction loop. I’ve said the priority is to reduce our dependence on glass rectangles.
Source: The Information (Jan 2026); OpenAI official announcements
Y Combinator’s latest cohort tells the same story: 22% of startups are now voice-first companies, up 70% from early 2024. Voice AI funding hit $2.1 billion in the most recent cycle.
Source: Speechmatics / Y Combinator Cohort Analysis (Jan 2026)
The conversational AI market is projected to hit $41.39 billion by 2030, growing at 23.7% annually. Voice AI agents alone are forecast to reach $139 billion by 2033. There will be 157.1 million voice assistant users in the US by end of this year. And Gartner projects 80% of businesses will deploy voice AI by 2028.
Sources: Grand View Research 2025; Statista Voice Assistant Forecast; Gartner Strategic Technology Trends 2026
“Voice is the natural interface for human-machine interaction, the true successor to buttons and touchscreens.”
— Kardome Technology
The phone is not dying because we hate it. It is dying because talking is just better.
⸻
Glasses, Not Glass
And it is not just voice. The physical replacement is coming too.
Mark Zuckerberg calls Meta’s Orion project “the most advanced glasses ever made” and has said explicitly they will “replace smartphones.” Meta is committing $115–135 billion in capital expenditure through 2026, with consumer Artemis glasses expected in 2027. They already hold 70% market share in the category.
Sources: Meta official announcements; IDC market share data; Reuters (Jan 2026)
But Meta is not alone. Snap spun out a $3 billion Spectacles division. Google is building Android XR with Warby Parker. Samsung has glasses planned for 2026. Amazon is entering the space. Brilliant Labs is running on-device AI.
Sources: Reuters; Glass Almanac; Samsung announcements
Yole Group, the semiconductor research firm, projects 18 million AR units by 2030 and calls 2026 “the potential inflection point” — the year when device maturity, ecosystem readiness and consumer willingness converge.
Source: Yole Group AR/VR Market Report (Sept 2025)
“2026 is the year AR glasses achieve the holy trinity: lightweight enough to wear all day, bright enough for outdoor use, smart enough to replace the phone for 80% of tasks.”
— V Future Media
Content will become three-dimensional and interactive. Not just watching Yellow Stone. Being John Dutton. Hell yes. The Sphere in Las Vegas is a preview. My friends at NorthHouse Creative are already creative immersive experiences for venues like Disney Paris. In a decade of iteration and we will have a creative medium as profound as the invention of cinema.
Glasses will do to the phone what the phone did to television, and what television did to radio.
When distribution changes, everything changes. That is the most historically consistent truth of technology. From the wheel to AI, we move forward.
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