Short answer: Front has no built-in dictation, but a system-wide voice tool works in every field. On Mac, install Voice Keyboard Pro, click into a reply or internal comment, hold your hotkey, and speak. On iPhone, switch to the Voice Keyboard Pro keyboard in the Front app and tap the mic.
Front is where a lot of teams do their talking to customers. Support, success, operations, sales, and finance all pile into shared inboxes, hand conversations back and forth, drop internal comments to loop in a teammate, and fire off replies all day. It is a writing tool disguised as an inbox. And like every writing tool, the bottleneck is not the software. It is how fast you can get words out of your head and onto the screen.
Most people type those words at around 40 words per minute. Most people speak at 130 to 150. That gap is the whole reason to consider dictating in Front: the replies get written faster, the internal comments get written at all instead of being skipped, and the running conversation stays legible because talking a full sentence costs less effort than typing a fragment. This guide covers how to dictate directly into Front on both the Mac app and the iPhone app, which fields are worth your voice, and how to keep the tone right so a dictated reply reads like a written one.
Does Front have built-in dictation?
No. Front does not ship a native voice-to-text feature in the composer or the comment box. It has AI features for summarizing and drafting, but nothing that lets you press a key and speak your reply into the field. For dictation, you bring your own tool.
That is actually the better arrangement, because the right tool works everywhere, not just in Front. A system-wide dictation app types into whatever field your cursor is in, so it does not care whether you are in the Front desktop app, Front in a browser tab, or the Front mobile app. There is no Front plugin to install, no admin integration to enable, and nothing that touches your team's Front configuration. The voice tool lives on your device.
Because it is system-wide, the same setup carries across the rest of the tools your inbox lives next to. If your team also works out of a fast email client, the workflow is identical to our guides on dictating in Superhuman and dictating in Spark: one voice tool, every composer, every app.
How to dictate in Front on a Mac
On macOS you can use the operating system's built-in dictation or a dedicated tool like Voice Keyboard Pro. Both place text at your cursor inside a Front reply or comment. The steps are the same either way.
Step by step
- Open Front (the desktop app or a browser tab) and select the conversation you are working.
- Click into the field you want to fill. This is the part people skip. Dictation types wherever the cursor sits, so click directly into the reply composer, the comment box, or the subject line before you talk.
- Trigger dictation. With Voice Keyboard Pro you hold your chosen hotkey; with the macOS built-in feature you press the Fn key or your configured shortcut.
- Speak in full sentences and say the punctuation where you want it: "thanks for flagging this comma I have reopened the ticket and will have an update by end of day period".
- Release the hotkey. The text drops into the field. Read it, adjust, and send or post the comment as normal.
The reason a dedicated hold-to-talk tool tends to fit Front well is that Front has two very different writing surfaces sitting inches apart: the customer-facing reply and the internal comment. A tool that reliably inserts text at the cursor behaves the same in both, so you never have to think about which mode you are in. If the built-in macOS feature is dropping words or refusing to type into the Front composer, our guide to Mac dictation not working in third-party apps covers the usual fixes.
The fields worth dictating in Front
The guiding rule for any inbox tool: speak the prose, type the addresses and structured bits. Here is where voice pays off in Front.
- Replies to customers. The main event. A dictated reply is usually longer, warmer, and more complete than a typed one, because the friction that makes people write "will do, thanks" instead of a real answer is gone. Talk the whole response.
- Internal comments. The quiet superpower of Front, and the field most often left empty because typing context for a teammate feels like extra work. Dictate it: "handing this to you comma customer is on the enterprise plan and already escalated once comma they want a callback not an email period." The next person picks up the thread with everything they need.
- Draft handoffs and message templates. When you are writing a reusable canned response or a shared draft, talk the first version and edit it down. This is the same first-pass workflow as any long-form writing.
- Subject lines on new conversations. Short, but still prose. Dictate it and move on.
The fields to leave alone
Dictation is the wrong tool for exact, structured, or lookup-driven data. Type these by hand:
- Email addresses in the To, Cc, and Bcc fields. Let Front's autocomplete match the contact rather than spelling an address out loud.
- Tags, assignees, and the inbox a conversation is routed to. These are menus, not text.
- Order numbers, account IDs, tracking numbers, and promo codes. Type or paste these. A spoken string of digits and letters is slower and more error-prone than typing it.
The rhythm that works: click into the composer, dictate the message, then use the mouse to set the tag, assignee, and any exact strings. Voice for the writing, the interface for the metadata.
Keeping the tone right on a dictated reply
There is a real trap with dictating customer replies, and it is worth naming. When you speak a reply right after reading a frustrating message, the words come out hotter than you would type them. Spoken language is also looser than written business English. A dictated reply can land as blunt, rambling, or oddly casual if you send it exactly as it came out of your mouth.
Two habits fix this. First, always read a dictated reply before sending, the same as you would proof a typed one. Second, on iPhone, use Voice Edit: after dictating, speak a change rather than retyping. Say "make the first sentence more apologetic" or "cut the last line" and the text is revised. On the Mac, a quick manual pass does the same job. The goal is that the reader can never tell the message was spoken, because a dictated reply that reads like a written one is the whole point.
Teaching your voice tool your inbox vocabulary
Every team has words a general transcription engine has never met: your product names, feature names, plan tiers, internal acronyms, and the surnames of the customers and colleagues you mention a dozen times a day. Left unmanaged, they come out as the nearest common word and you spend your saved time on corrections.
Voice Keyboard Pro's Smart Vocabulary solves this. It is a personal dictionary with replacement rules: say a term the way you naturally would, and it is always written the correct way. Seed it with your product and feature names, your plan names, and the accounts you handle most. Because the dictionary applies system-wide, the same entries help you everywhere else too, from a chat reply in Intercom to a summary you paste into your CRM. Ten minutes of setup ends the proper-noun problem for good.
How to dictate in Front on an iPhone
A lot of Front usage happens on the move: triaging the shared inbox before you reach a desk, firing a quick reply from the road, dropping a comment so a teammate can run with something. Typing a proper reply on a phone keyboard is exactly the friction that produces one-word answers. Voice fixes that.
The iPhone version of Voice Keyboard Pro is a full custom keyboard with a mic button built in. Because it is a keyboard, it works inside the Front app and anywhere else that takes text. Set it up once:
- Install Voice Keyboard Pro from the App Store and open it once to complete setup.
- Go to Settings → General → Keyboard → Keyboards → Add New Keyboard and add Voice Keyboard Pro. Turn on Allow Full Access so it can transcribe.
- In the Front app, tap into a reply or comment, tap the globe icon to switch to the Voice Keyboard Pro keyboard, then tap the mic and talk.
If you have not enabled a third-party keyboard before, our walkthrough on enabling Full Access on iPhone explains exactly what that permission does. Once it is on, a full reply from your phone stops being a chore you postpone until you are back at a laptop.
The iPhone keyboard also does two-way translation across 24 languages while you dictate. For a shared inbox that serves customers in more than one language, you can speak your reply and have it written in theirs, or read an incoming message in a language you do not work in. That collapses a translation detour into a single step, which matters when a shared inbox spans regions and time zones.
A realistic shared-inbox workflow
Here is how it fits together on a normal shift. You open a conversation that just landed in a team inbox. You skim it, click into the reply composer, hold your hotkey, and talk the whole answer, punctuation and all. You release, read it once, soften one sentence, and send. Total time: less than typing a shorter, worse version would have taken.
Before you move on, you click into the internal comment box and dictate a two-line handoff so whoever picks up the follow-up has the context. That comment almost certainly would not have existed if you had to type it, because the effort would not have felt worth it. That is the real gain from dictation in Front: not just faster replies, but the notes and context that usually get skipped now actually get written. The same effect shows up wherever a team writes a lot, which is why voice tends to spread from the inbox into email and beyond.
Is dictating into Front secure?
This is the right thing to ask, because a shared inbox handles customer names, account details, and sometimes sensitive information. Voice Keyboard Pro works on a clear boundary: your audio is transcribed and the text is placed at your cursor, and the company's servers store only the operational pings needed to run the service. As of the May 2026 privacy update, no audio and no transcript content are retained on the backend. What you dictate into a Front reply becomes text in the composer and stays in your Front account, under your team's own controls.
As with any per-app dictation in a work setting, follow your employer's policy. Some organizations restrict which third-party tools can process customer data, and a support team handling regulated information may have specific rules. We cannot rule on your company's compliance obligations, so if you operate under strict data-handling requirements, clear the tool with your security team before pointing it at live customer conversations. If it is approved, dictate freely; if not, you have asked the right question first.
The bottom line
Front will not add dictation to its composer, and it does not need to. A system-wide voice tool treats every Front field like the plain text box it is. Speak your replies, internal comments, and drafts; type the addresses, tags, and reference numbers. Read every dictated reply before it goes out, seed a personal vocabulary with your product and account names, and use the same tool on the Mac with a hotkey and on the iPhone with the keyboard mic.
Voice Keyboard Pro has a free tier, so you can point it at your next Front conversation and see the difference before committing. Dictate one full reply and one internal comment, and compare them to what you would have typed. The gap is the point. Pro is $4.99 a month or $34.99 a year when you are ready to lift the daily limits.