Writers
Speak the draft.Edit at the keyboard.
The blank page is a typing problem more often than a thinking one. You know roughly what the scene or the paragraph says, and the keyboard asks you to get every sentence right before it lets you see the next one. A voice does not ask.
The short answer
Yes, dictation is worth it for writers, for the first draft and not for the edit. Speaking runs at about three times typing speed and, more usefully, it does not let you stop to polish, so the draft gets finished. Dictate a paragraph per breath, leave the names and the dialogue punctuation for later, then edit at the keyboard. The one thing to check in any tool is whether its cleanup pass rewrites your sentences. If it does, it is editing you, and your voice is the part of the draft worth keeping.
Where a voice wins
Five parts of the writing day, and which ones a voice is for.
Typing rewards the sentence you are on. Speaking rewards the one after it. That is why a typed draft stalls and a spoken one runs on, and it decides every row below.
| The task | At the keyboard | By voice |
|---|---|---|
| The first draft | A sentence, then a better sentence, then the same sentence again. Three hundred careful words in an hour and a scene that is still not finished. | The whole scene, rough, in the time it takes to tell it. Rough is what a first draft is for, and finished beats careful at this stage. |
| Notes, outlines, the idea on a walk | Two words in a notes app that mean nothing a week later. | The full thought, while you still have it. Said in a minute, readable in a month. |
| Getting unstuck | Staring at the cursor until the sentence arrives. | Telling the scene to yourself out loud, badly, the way you would explain it to a friend. Most of what you say is usable, and the rest shows you where the problem is. |
| Line editing | Yes. Choosing between two words, cutting a clause, moving a sentence. | No. Editing is selecting and replacing, and a voice is bad at both. This page is honest about that because the tool it sells is a dictation tool. |
| Reading the draft back | The eye skims what it already knows, so the clumsy sentence survives a fourth read. | Heard, not read. Writers have read drafts aloud for as long as there have been drafts, because the ear catches what the eye forgives. |
The line is not between fiction and everything else. It is between producing words and choosing them. A voice produces. A keyboard chooses.
The real failure list
What actually goes wrong when a writer dictates.
The cleanup pass rewrites you
Every tool that turns a raw transcript into clean text runs it through a language model, and a language model left free to improve things will. It smooths the fragment you meant, swaps the plain word for a fancier one, and flattens a narrator's voice into the same competent prose as everyone else's. For a developer that is an annoyance. For a writer it is the one failure that matters.
Invented names come back as words
A character called Maelis turns into "May lease". A town you made up turns into the nearest real word. Recognition is prediction, and a name nobody has ever written down has nothing holding it up. It will be wrong the same way every time, which is the good news.
Dialogue loses its shape
Spoken punctuation by name works for the basics: period, comma, question mark, new paragraph. Dialogue is harder, because a line of speech, its tag and its quotation marks are three things the speaker has to say and nobody does. Expect to punctuate dialogue at the keyboard.
The tool drifts your language
If you write in Portuguese, a tool that decides your text "should" be the more common variant will turn European forms into Brazilian ones, or formalise the way a character talks. Write in English with Portuguese or Spanish names and dialogue, and a tool that pins one language per dictation forces the minority half into the majority one.
The second and third belong to the speech model and to the fact that dialogue is a written form. No small app fixes either. The first and the last are product decisions, and the ones worth choosing a tool on.
The fix
How to dictate a first draft.
Five habits, five minutes to learn, on any dictation tool. None of them asks you to speak like a book. They move the polishing to the stage where a keyboard is better at it.
- 01
One paragraph per breath
Hold the key for a paragraph or a beat of the scene, then let go and look. Long enough to stop thinking in sentences, short enough that a fumble costs you one paragraph and not a page. It is also the length dictation tools handle best.
- 02
Correct yourself out loud and keep going
"She left on Tuesday, I mean Thursday." "Scratch that." A cleanup pass that resolves spoken corrections keeps only the version you meant. Stopping to delete is a typing habit, and it is the one that makes dictation feel slow.
- 03
Say the breaks
Say "new paragraph" at every change of beat, speaker or place. Structure is the one thing a transcript cannot guess, and a draft that arrives in paragraphs is a draft you can start editing straight away.
- 04
Leave the names and the dialogue for later
Let Maelis be "May lease" for the whole session. An invented name comes back wrong the same way every time, so one find-and-replace at the end fixes the chapter. Do the dialogue punctuation in the same pass.
- 05
Edit at the keyboard, then listen
Edit the way you always have. Then have the passage read aloud to you and listen for the sentence that trips. The rhythm problem the eye forgave on the fourth read is usually obvious the first time you hear it.
If the draft reads like somebody else wrote it after step five, the tool's cleanup pass is rewording you, and that is the one thing in this list you cannot fix with a habit.
What we built
Hold a key, write the scene.
Sonira pastes where the cursor is: Scrivener, Ulysses, Word, Google Docs, Obsidian, iA Writer, an email to your editor. There is no list of supported apps, because a paste is the one thing every writing app already accepts.
The pass that cleans the transcript is written to do a short list of things and then stop. Punctuation. Hesitation and false starts out. "Scratch that" and "I mean" resolved to the version you meant. "New paragraph" turned into a paragraph. Then the rules that matter to a writer, in writing: keep the speaker's exact wording, never summarise or add anything, never change the register. A fragment stays a fragment. Your plain word stays plain.
What it does not do: there is no custom vocabulary yet, so an invented name comes out as words and you fix it once at the end. Dialogue punctuation is yours. The cleanup has a hard time limit and, rather than make you wait, gives back your raw words when it runs out, so a very long hold can come back less tidy. The longest dictation in our own log is about a minute. Read-aloud takes up to 6,000 characters per tap, about a thousand words, so a chapter goes a section at a time.
Honest note: the build on this site is the current one. Read-aloud is in it.
Hold a key. Speak. The words land where the cursor is.
Hear the draft
The oldest editing trick, without asking anyone to read to you.
Reading a draft aloud works because the ear does not skim. A sentence with one clause too many runs out of breath. A repeated word rings. A line of dialogue that no person would say sounds like no person said it. Most writers know this and skip it, because reading your own work aloud is slow and a little embarrassing.
Sonira reads it to you. Select a passage in almost any app, tap the same key you hold to dictate, and it reads in a clean voice at the speed you set. Voice in for the draft, voice out for the edit. Most dictation tools stop at the first half. We built the second because it is the half writers were already doing by hand.
Listen at a different speed
Slow the voice down for a passage where the rhythm matters, or speed it up for a structural pass, where the question is whether a chapter moves and not whether a sentence sings. The speed is a slider in settings.
Good to know
Questions, answered.
- 01Can I dictate a whole novel?
- You can dictate the first draft of one, a paragraph at a time. Nobody dictates the finished book. Revision is choosing words, and choosing is a keyboard job. The writers who get most out of dictation draft by voice and revise by hand.
- 02Will it change my style?
- Not in Sonira. The cleanup pass is told in writing to keep your exact wording, never to summarise or add anything, and never to change the register. It fixes punctuation, removes hesitation and false starts, and resolves spoken corrections. That is the question to ask of any tool before you give it a draft.
- 03Does it work in Scrivener, Word or Google Docs?
- Yes. Sonira pastes at the cursor, so any app you can paste into takes the text: Scrivener, Ulysses, Word, Pages, Google Docs in the browser, Obsidian. There is no plugin to install.
- 04How do I handle dialogue and quotation marks?
- Dictate the lines, and do the quotation marks and tags at the keyboard. Spoken punctuation works for periods, commas, question marks and paragraphs. Dialogue is a written convention with no natural spoken form, and that part is faster to fix by hand than to say.
- 05What about character names and invented words?
- They come back as the nearest ordinary words the first time, and Sonira has no custom vocabulary yet. The same name usually comes back wrong the same way, so a single find-and-replace at the end of a session fixes it.
- 06Why not the free dictation built into the Mac?
- Try it first. It is free and it is fine for a sentence. For a draft, raw transcription prints every hesitation and restart, and a paragraph of speech has a lot of them. A cleanup pass that removes those without touching your words is the main thing a paid tool adds, and read-aloud is the other.
Speak the draft. Edit at the keyboard.
Free while we're in beta.
Writing in Portuguese? European and Brazilian, kept apart.
Write for a coding agent too? The developers guide.
New to dictation? Start with the Mac guide.