Why mail is the best place to start
Email and chat are where dictation pays off fastest. The replies are short enough that you know what you want to say before you start, and long enough that typing them is a chore. You also already talk this way: an email reply is mostly what you would have said if the person were standing at your desk.
With Reeve you put the cursor in the reply field, hold fn, say it and let go. The text appears in 1.5 to 2.5 seconds, cleaned up and punctuated, with the “um” and the false starts gone.
One thought, two apps
Reeve checks which app you are in before it writes. Here is the same spoken sentence in two places:
hi both thanks for the deck um looks good I'd move the pricing slide before the case study and can we get it to the client by friday
In Mail:
In Slack:
Those are the default habits. Each app has its own rule, and you can change it. If your team writes formal Slack messages, tell Reeve that. If you sign every mail the same way, put it in the Mail rule.
Rewrite marked text by voice
This is the feature people end up using most. Mark any text, in any app, then hold the key and say what you want changed. Reeve replaces the marked text with the new version. Some instructions that work well:
- “Make this half as long.”
- “More formal, this goes to the board.”
- “Friendlier, she's a new client.”
- “Turn this into three bullet points.”
- “Put the question first.”
It works on text you dictated and on text you typed or pasted. A long mail draft from yesterday can be tightened in one sentence.
Names that stay right
Mail is full of names: clients, colleagues, products, places. Dictation gets them wrong in a way that is embarrassing to send. When you fix how Reeve wrote a name, it keeps your version and uses it next time. After a week, the people you write to most are spelled the way they spell themselves.
Longer messages
For a status update or a long reply, keep talking. Reeve sends the audio in slices of about 20 seconds while you speak, so a two-minute message lands a few seconds after you stop. Then mark it and say “tighten this” if it rambles. The long dictation guide covers this in more depth.
Small habits that help
- Say one point at a time. Short dictations are easier to fix than one long one.
- Read before you send. Reeve is careful, and you are still the one sending it.
- Use rewrite instead of retyping. If a sentence is close, mark it and say what is off.
- Danish and English mix fine. Say the English product name in the middle of a Danish sentence and it stays English. See the Danish page.
If a web app ever steals focus while you talk, nothing is lost: every result is also on your clipboard.