How to Write Faster by Talking Instead of Typing

The arithmetic nobody mentions

A confident office typist manages somewhere around 40 words a minute. Most people speak comfortably at around 130. That is roughly three times faster, and it is why the same email that takes eight minutes to type takes about ninety seconds to say out loud.

The catch, and it is a real one, is that spoken words come out messy. You circle back. You say the thing, then say it again slightly better. You throw in an um. Which is exactly why dictation on its own never really caught on, and why it suddenly works now: you speak the mess, and AI tidies it.

🤝Heads up: this lesson links to Wispr Flow through an affiliate link, so LearnAI earns a commission if you subscribe. It costs you nothing extra, and it is what keeps these courses free. We tell you where these tools fall short too, including who should not use them.

Start free, today, on the thing in your pocket

Before you install or buy anything, use what you already own. Every modern phone and computer has dictation built in and switched off by default.

On a phone, tap the microphone on the keyboard. On a Mac, dictation lives in the keyboard section of System Settings. On Windows, the Windows key plus H starts it in almost any text box.

Spend one afternoon dictating your messages with the free option. You will learn more about whether this suits you than any article can tell you, and it costs nothing.

The two step method that actually works

Do not try to dictate a finished email. That is the mistake that makes people give up. Dictate a rough draft in your own rambling words, then hand it to AI with a tidying instruction.

Below is something I dictated, so it is rambling and has no punctuation.
Turn it into a clear written [email / note / message].
Keep my meaning and my phrasing where it works. Remove repetition and filler.
Fix punctuation and paragraph breaks. Do not add facts I did not say.
Do not make it more formal than I sounded.
WHAT I SAID:
[paste the transcription]

The line about not making it more formal matters. Left alone, AI will translate your relaxed spoken voice into stiff business prose, which throws away the main advantage: dictated writing tends to sound like a human being.

Where speaking beats typing

Long emails and anything with a story in it. Explaining a situation is something you already do out loud all day. Your mouth is better at it than your fingers.

First drafts of anything. A blank page is much less frightening when the instruction is just say what you mean.

Notes while walking or between meetings. The thought you had in the corridor usually evaporates before you sit down.

Thinking out loud about a problem. Talk for two minutes about what is going wrong, then ask AI to pull out the actual issues.

I talked out loud for two minutes about a problem at work. The transcript is below.
Pull out:

The actual problem, in one sentence.
The three things I seem most worried about.
Any decision I appear to have already made without noticing.
Ignore the filler and repetition.
TRANSCRIPT:
[paste it]

And the one that saves the most time in a normal week: speaking your reply instead of composing it.

Below is an email I received, and then me talking out loud about how I want to answer it.
Write the reply. Use my spoken answer as the content, not as a rough idea to improve on.
Address every point they raised. Keep my level of formality, which is fairly relaxed.
Under 150 words.
THEIR EMAIL:
[paste it]
WHAT I SAID OUT LOUD:
[paste the transcription]

Where typing still wins

Short replies. Anything numerical. Anything you need to phrase precisely, like a contract clause or a sensitive message to a colleague. Open plan offices, where dictating your appraisal notes at conversational volume is a poor career move. And any environment where being overheard is a problem at all.

The tool that removes the second step

Once dictation becomes a habit, the copy-and-paste dance between the transcription and the AI gets tedious. Tools like Wispr Flow collapse it into one action: you hold a key, speak, and cleaned up text appears in whatever box your cursor is in, whether that is Outlook, a spreadsheet comment or a chat window. It handles the punctuation and the ums without being asked.

Who it suits. People who write a lot of medium-length text across many different apps. People who already found the free built-in dictation useful and got tired of fixing punctuation. People who think faster than they type and feel it.

Who it does not suit, and this might be you. Some people simply do not compose out loud. Their thinking happens through their fingers, and speaking a draft feels like trying to write with the wrong hand. That is not a skill gap, it is how some brains work, and no tool fixes it.

It is also a poor fit if you work in a quiet shared space, if most of your writing is short replies and numbers, if you have a strong accent that the free tools already struggled with (test that first, for free), or if your employer restricts which software can be installed on your machine.

Pricing for these tools changes, and most offer some free allowance, so check the current terms yourself rather than taking anyone's word for it.

Give it a fortnight

Dictation feels ridiculous for the first few days. You will speak too carefully, run out of words halfway through a sentence, and be embarrassed by your own transcript. That passes around day four. If it has not clicked after two weeks, it is genuinely not for you, and typing remains an excellent technology.