How to Write More Emails in Less Time

Email is where a lot of the workday quietly disappears. If you are typing every reply by hand, you are doing it the slow way. The faster path is to speak your emails, let AI tidy them up, and move on. Here is exactly how to do that on a Mac.

Why typing is the bottleneck

The average person types somewhere in the range of 40 words per minute, and comfortable speaking is much faster, which is why the one honest speed claim worth repeating is that most people speak around three to four times faster than they type. For a sense of the numbers behind that, the concept of words per minute is well documented. When your inbox has thirty replies waiting, that gap compounds fast.

There is a second cost that is easy to miss: the physical toll. Hammering out email after email is part of why typing all day is hard on your hands and wrists. Switching some of that load to your voice is not just faster, it is easier on your body.

The faster workflow: speak, clean, send

The workflow is deliberately simple. It works because the slow part, forming the words, is the part your mouth already does better than your fingers.

1. Place your cursor in the email body, wherever you would normally start typing.
2. Press one shortcut and just talk, the way you would explain the reply to a colleague.
3. Let the AI clean it up as the text lands: filler removed, punctuation added, tone adjusted.
4. Skim and send. A quick read is usually all a cleaned draft needs.

Because BlaBlaType works system-wide, this is the same in every app: it types wherever your cursor is, so Gmail in the browser, Apple Mail, Outlook and Superhuman all behave identically. There is no separate window to copy out of and no per-app setup.

Raw dictation is not enough: AI cleanup is the point

Plain dictation has a bad reputation for a reason. Spoken language is full of "um", restarts and run-on sentences, and dumping that verbatim into an email makes you look careless. The difference with a modern tool is the on-device AI layer that rewrites your speech: it strips filler words, fixes punctuation and grammar, and can adapt the tone so a casual ramble reads as a professional note.

You can push this further with a custom dictionary for client names and jargon so nothing gets mangled, and custom prompts if you want a consistent house style. The same cleanup that makes email faster is what makes voice viable for async status updates and standups, and for heavier writing like thesis and dissertation drafts.

Do and do not: dictating email well

Typing vs dictation for email

If keyboard-driven control is your main goal rather than speed alone, dedicated tools like Talon Voice take a different, command-heavy approach. For everyday inbox clearing, though, plain spoken dictation with automatic cleanup is the lowest-friction win.

Keeping email private while you go faster

Faster email should not mean leaking it. Email threads carry client names, deal terms, legal language and personal details, so where the transcription happens matters. With BlaBlaType, both speech recognition and AI cleanup run entirely on your Mac, so the contents never get uploaded to a server. If you want the deeper reasoning, we cover exactly whether Mac dictation is private in its own guide, and you can compare plans on the pricing page.