About a year ago, my email workflow looked like this.
Read the message. Switch to ChatGPT. Type out some context. Type out what I wanted to say. Edit it a little. Copy the output. Paste it into my email. Edit it again. Send.
Faster than writing from scratch? Yes. But it was still four or five steps and 10-15 minutes per email.
Today, I read the message, talk out my reply, and it is 90% ready to send.
The change: I stopped typing.
The App That Changed It
The tool is called WhisperFlow, and it is my highest-leverage single app right now.
Most people have tried their phone or Mac built-in voice dictation and found it frustrating. You have to speak in perfect sentences. If you pause or stumble, it produces garbled text. The output needs heavy editing. So they give up and go back to typing.
WhisperFlow is different because there is an AI processing layer between what you say and what appears on screen.
You can ramble. Think out loud. Start a sentence, change direction, come back to it. The AI cleans it up into clear, properly formatted text. You are not transcribing speech — you are letting your natural thinking flow, and the AI turns it into something usable.
That one difference makes voice dictation actually practical.
The Speed Math
A detailed prompt that used to take me 20 minutes to type now takes about 5 minutes to dictate.
For emails, it is even more dramatic. I used to spend 10-15 minutes on a substantive email reply — reading, thinking, typing, editing. Now I am under 5 minutes for most emails. Read, talk, light cleanup, send.
Across a full week of emails and prompts, that is hours of time back.
But here is the part that surprised me more than the speed.
Voice Unlocks Different Thinking
When you type, you edit as you go. Every sentence gets filtered before it leaves your fingers. You trim ideas before they are fully formed. The text you produce is clean, but it is also compressed — you lose some of the nuance and context that was in your head.
When you talk, you think out loud. The thinking is less filtered. You say things you might not have typed. You add context you might have left out.
The prompts I dictate tend to be richer than the ones I type. More context, more nuance, more of the actual thought behind the request. And when the prompt is better, the output is better.
This surprised me because I assumed voice dictation was just a speed optimization. It turned out to also change the quality.
How I Use It Day-to-Day
WhisperFlow works across everything — ChatGPT, Claude, email, Slack, anywhere you type text.
For prompting: I open whatever AI tool I am using and instead of typing, I just hit the WhisperFlow shortcut and talk through what I want. Long, detailed prompts that would have taken me 20 minutes now take 5.
For email: I read the incoming message, then talk through my reply out loud. The context is fresh in my head, so the response is usually close to what I would write. Quick cleanup and done.
For messages: Same thing. Whether it is Slack or a text, I dictate more than I type now.
I also built this into a broader tool stack for the days I am moving fast. WhisperFlow handles the input layer. Lindy handles the automations that run in the background. Paste, a clipboard manager, makes it easy to store and reuse screenshots and templates. Together, they have changed the texture of my day more than almost anything else I have done in the last year.
How to Start
WhisperFlow is available on Mac and iPhone. The setup takes a few minutes — you set a keyboard shortcut, and from then on, you press the shortcut wherever you want to dictate.
The learning curve is mostly about getting comfortable talking to your computer. If you have never done it, it feels awkward for the first hour. By day three, you will not want to go back.
Start with email. Pick one reply tomorrow that you would normally spend 10 minutes writing. Dictate it instead. See what the output looks like.
If you are spending more than a couple hours a week typing prompts or composing messages, this is worth 10 minutes to try. It is the single highest-leverage app in my current stack — and I do not say that lightly.
