How to dictate an email in Gmail
Dictation is the fastest way to get words into an email and the slowest way to get a sendable one — because every built-in dictation tool writes down exactly what came out of your mouth, ums included.
The built-in dictation on your machine
- 1Windows: click into the Gmail compose box and press Win + H. Speak. Say "full stop" and "new line" for punctuation.
- 2macOS: turn on Dictation in System Settings › Keyboard, then press the shortcut you set and speak into the compose box.
- 3Android and iPhone: tap the microphone on the keyboard while composing in the Gmail app.
- 4Then read it back and fix it, which is the step nobody mentions.
Where it gets tiring. These are transcribers, not writers. You get one long paragraph in the order your thoughts arrived, with "um" and "sorry, I mean" left in and names spelled as they sounded. For a note to yourself that is fine. For a client, you end up rewriting the whole thing, and the time you saved is gone.
With MailGeni
Say it roughly; send it properly
- 1Press the microphone in the MailGeni panel and talk the way you would to a colleague — backtrack, change your mind, trail off.
- 2It transcribes as you speak, then rewrites what you said as an email: the right order, real paragraphs, your usual tone.
- 3Say your punctuation if you want it — "question mark", "new paragraph", "open inverted commas" — and it is written as punctuation, not typed out as words.
- 4Names it has seen in your mail are spelled correctly, and a correction you make once is remembered for next time.
There is a real difference between a dictaphone and an assistant. You are not composing out loud sentence by sentence; you are saying what you want to happen, and getting back an email that says it.
Questions people ask
- Can I dictate a reply as well as a new email?
- Yes — the microphone is on the reply panel, the compose window and the Ask box, and all three go through the same pipeline.
- Is my voice recording kept?
- No. The audio is transcribed for that request and not stored by MailGeni.
- What about accents and technical words?
- It works from the names and terms already in your mailbox, so people and companies you write to regularly come out right. Corrections you make are learned rather than repeated.
Checked on 15 September 2026.