Voice typing for email
Write email at the speed you talk, in any mail program.
Email is the most common place CaringDictate gets used — and the place voice typing helps most. Outlook, Gmail in Chrome or Edge, Yahoo Mail, Apple Mail on Windows, Thunderbird, web-based work mail. CaringDictate types into all of them.
Email is where voice typing earns its place.
The first thing most CaringDictate users do — within minutes of installing — is open their email program, click into a draft, and dictate a long message they had been putting off. That moment is the whole point of the product. A message that would have taken twenty minutes of slow, painful typing takes ninety seconds of speaking, and you send it the same day instead of saving the draft for a tomorrow that might not come.
CaringDictate works in every email program on Windows. That is not a marketing claim — it is a technical fact. CaringDictate types into whatever has the cursor, which means any text field in any program. Outlook on the desktop. Gmail in Chrome or Edge. Yahoo or AOL or Verizon mail in a browser. Apple Mail via web. Thunderbird. Spark. Your company's Outlook Web App. Anywhere there is a place for an email body, CaringDictate will type into it.
Step by step
How to do it
- 1
Open your email program.
Outlook, Gmail in a browser, Yahoo Mail, Apple Mail running on a Windows machine via web, Thunderbird — anything you would normally type email into.
- 2
Click into the body of the email.
Click into the big text area where the body of your email goes. CaringDictate types into whatever text field has the cursor — so make sure the cursor is in the email body.
- 3
Press your hotkey.
The hotkey you chose during setup (Ctrl+Space by default). A soft chime plays. You'll see a small indicator in the corner of your screen showing CaringDictate is listening.
- 4
Speak the email.
Talk naturally — full sentences. Say "comma" or "period" or "new line" where you want punctuation. Say "new paragraph" to add a line break.
- 5
Press the hotkey again to stop.
The chime plays again. The words appear in your email body. Read it over, fix anything that needs fixing with your mouse, and send.
Quick tips
Tips that make this even easier
- Use a USB headset microphone for long emails. Built-in laptop mics work but pick up background noise. A $20 USB headset dramatically improves accuracy on longer dictations.
- Say punctuation explicitly. "Comma" inserts a comma, "period" inserts a period, "question mark" inserts ?. "New paragraph" inserts a line break. These commands become automatic within a day.
- Speak in complete sentences. Recognition accuracy is better when you give the model a full sentence to work with. Half-sentences and one-word bursts produce more errors.
- Don't worry about exact grammar — fix it after. Most users dictate the whole email, then read it over and clean up small things with the mouse. Trying to dictate perfect grammar slows you down.
- For very long messages, dictate in chunks. Press the hotkey, do a paragraph, press it again. Then start a new dictation for the next paragraph. This is easier on your throat and easier to proof.
- Email signatures and reply-quotes stay intact. Voice typing inserts at the cursor — it does not touch the rest of the message. Your signature, the original email being replied to, and any inserted images stay exactly as they were.
See also: Using CaringDictate in Microsoft Word, Voice typing for Messenger and chat.