Most people type about forty words a minute. Most people talk at a hundred and fifty. That gap is the whole argument for voice, and it is why dictation is the part of AI Assist people keep using after the novelty wears off.
This page is about when talking beats typing, when it does not, and how to get good at it in about a week.
The speed is not really about words per minute. It is about what typing does to your attention.
When you type a file note you are choosing words, watching the screen, fixing typos and deciding where the cursor goes. When you talk you are just remembering the meeting. The thinking is simpler, so the note gets written instead of sitting on your list until Friday.
The same applies to a new Client. Typing one means eleven fields, a lot of tabbing and at least one thing you forget. Saying one means describing a person you have just met, which you could do in your sleep.
The classic. You have just come off a twenty-minute conversation and you remember all of it. Thirty seconds of talking captures what would otherwise be gone by tomorrow.
Name, company, phone, email, what they want, when to chase them — one breath. See Talk Your New Client File.
Driving between jobs, on a site, carrying something. This is the case where voice is not faster than typing — it is the difference between the note existing and not existing.
A meeting summary, an email you keep rewriting, a description of what a Client needs. If you have been avoiding writing it, talking usually breaks the block.
A Journal Entry you would otherwise write on a sticky note. See Talk Your Journal Entries.
Voice is not always the right tool, and pretending otherwise wastes your time.
Anything with exact strings. Account numbers, reference codes, email addresses with unusual spellings. Type those.
Small corrections. Changing one figure in a form is a click. Do not narrate it.
Rooms with other people in them. Open-plan offices and quiet trains are what the keyboard is for.
Talk in whole sentences. The assistant handles natural speech well and keyword-speak badly. “Add a Task to call Sarah on Thursday about the year end” beats “task Sarah Thursday year end”.
Do not perform. Normal pace, normal voice. Over-enunciating makes recognition worse, not better.
Say the punctuation only where it matters. For long dictated text, saying “new paragraph” is worth it. For a one-line Task it is not.
Correct in the form, not out loud. When something comes back wrong, fix the field. Re-dictating the whole thing to change one word is slower.
Set up My Voice. Dictation and My Voice lets you record your tone and sign-off once, so dictated emails come out sounding like you rather than like a machine.
Give it a week. Talking to software feels odd for about three days. Then it feels odd to go back.
Dictation is the input; the connection is what makes it valuable. A spoken note lands against the Client record, next to their Invoices, files and emails. A spoken Task appears on your Dashboard. A spoken Invoice becomes bookkeeping when you save it.
Voice on a notes app gives you text you then have to file somewhere. Voice here puts the thing where it belongs, first time.
It is not hearing me. Check the browser has microphone permission — it asks once, and it is easy to dismiss without noticing.
Names come out wrong. Unusual surnames are the common case. Fix it in the form; you are correcting one field, not the whole entry.
It stopped halfway through. Long silences can end the capture. Keep going, or dictate in two passes.
It is picking up the room. Background conversation confuses it. A headset makes a bigger difference than anything else you can change.
The text is right but the fields are wrong. Say the field names as you go — “email is…”, “phone is…” — and it maps much more reliably.
No. It runs in the browser, on your phone as well as your computer.
It captures what you dictate in order to turn it into text and act on it. It is not listening in the background — it works when you start it and stops when you finish.
Generally well. Speak at a normal pace rather than carefully; slowing down tends to make recognition worse.
Try it and see how it does with your phrasing. English is where it is strongest today.
No. Dictation fills the form; you approve it. Same rule as everything else in AI Assist.
Yes, and that is where most people find it indispensable — a note dictated in the car park is a note that actually gets written.
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