Interesting topic
I use gboard on Android with the meta app as speech to text. I do that because I was born right-handed and it doesn’t now work so typing is very slow.
Typed text is a format with a changing position in the world. I think it’s prevalence will go down. AI is already capable of language translation and speech to text and text to speech so the questions of search and advertising breaks etc is only short term and will become moot.
Speed differences are that people generally think at 600 to 800 words a minute and speak at 200 or less. Replaying audio at 1.7 is about optimal for listening only because people’s diction makes detection of the words hard and I suspect AI processing will remove that barrier fairly soon.
Automatic summarisation together with interest filters and other forms of matching interests to contributions (similar to the way in which cookies currently serve advertisers) are all just the transitionery challenges.
Speech and text are just formats for the input and the output. So support will soon emerge for use of text/speech as an option for output readers as well as speech text an option for input - I’m sure it’s not far away.
Not every forum is moderated like this one so the question of listening to every post even if you don’t have AI support is not universal. Having not used Apple I’m unaware of the speech to text but gboard on Android is free and anybody who has the technology to access a discourse based forum is not far from having universal access to speech to text with natural language translation built in
This topic is one of the many ways in which new paradigms are opened up in the evolution of digitally enabled community.