Let's start with what the keyboard wins, because it wins a lot. Precise text editing. Anything mid-sentence. Single-key operations you've already burned into muscle memory — ⌘T for a new tab will beat saying “open a new tab” for the rest of your life. If a task is one keystroke away, your voice should stay out of it.
The keyboard's weakness isn't speed. It's that a keystroke only works inside the app that has focus, and real tasks rarely stay inside one app.
Consider what “check whether the build is green and tell Sam” actually costs by hand: switch to the terminal, scroll the output, switch to Mail, find the thread, write the reply, send it, switch back to what you were doing. None of those steps is hard. What's expensive is the switching itself — every context change is a chance to forget why you started, and desk research on task interruption keeps finding that recovery takes minutes, not seconds.
That's the shape of task where a sentence wins: one utterance that spans several apps. Soren runs the terminal command in your visible terminal, reads the result, drafts the reply in Mail itself, and asks before sending — while your editor never loses focus. The win isn't that speaking is faster than typing. It's that you didn't leave.
A second, less obvious category: work that happens behind your focus. Soren drives Chrome through an extension in a background tab — it can open pages, group your tabs, or watch a request in the network log without the browser window ever coming forward. There is no keyboard equivalent of doing something in an app you're not looking at.
Third: hands-busy, eyes-busy moments. Tail the logs while you're reading a diff. Queue the focus playlist while you're sketching. These aren't heroic automations; they're small frictions that stop being worth doing by hand the moment they cost a window switch — and become free when they cost a sentence.
So how do you measure whether voice is worth it for you? Not with typing-speed comparisons — that test is rigged for the keyboard and misses the point. Time the whole task: from deciding to do it, through every app switch, to being back where you started with your train of thought intact. Voice earns its place when a sentence replaces a sequence of switches. It doesn't earn its place replacing keystrokes, and a good voice tool shouldn't ask to.
Our rule of thumb after months of daily use: if it's one action in the app you're already in, use your hands. If it's three actions across two apps, say it.