Short answer: HEY has no built-in dictation, but every text field accepts voice. On Mac, install Voice Keyboard Pro, click into a reply or new email, hold your hotkey, speak, and release. On iPhone, switch to the Voice Keyboard Pro keyboard in the HEY app and tap its mic button to dictate into any field.
HEY has strong opinions about email, and most of them are about triage: the Imbox for what matters, the Screener for who gets in, the Feed for newsletters, Reply Later for the things you owe a response. What HEY does not have an opinion about is how you get words into the box once you decide to write. There is no microphone button in the composer, on desktop or on mobile. If you want to dictate your replies instead of typing them, that has to come from somewhere else.
This matters more with HEY than with a lot of email tools, because HEY's whole philosophy pushes you toward writing real replies. The system is designed to collapse the pile of open threads down to a small set of things that genuinely need a response from you. And a real response is prose. So once triage is done, you are left with the actual work of email, which is composing thoughtful messages, and that is exactly the work voice is best at. This guide covers how to dictate into HEY on both Mac and iPhone, which fields are worth it, and how voice fits HEY's Reply Later and Set Aside habits.
Why HEY has no dictation of its own
HEY runs as a web app on the desktop and as a native app on iPhone and iPad. Neither exposes a dictation button in the composer, because email composition is a standard text field and dictation is treated as an operating-system or keyboard-level capability, not something each app reinvents. That is normal. Most email clients work this way, which is why the same setup that dictates into HEY will also dictate into every other app you use.
The upside is that there is nothing HEY-specific to install or enable. You add a voice tool at the system level once, and from then on HEY's composer, subject line, and Reply Later notes all accept voice the same way they accept typing. HEY does not need a plugin, an integration, or a setting change.
The HEY fields worth dictating
Voice pays off unevenly across HEY. Here is where it earns its keep and where the keyboard still wins.
- Replies. The main event. HEY funnels you toward writing genuine responses, and a genuine response is a paragraph or two of real thought. Speaking it is faster and, for many people, warmer and clearer than typing it, because you write the way you would actually talk to the person.
- New emails. Same story. A fresh message is prose, and prose is what dictation handles best.
- Subject lines. A short, specific subject is a quick voice win, and HEY threads by subject, so a clear one is worth getting right.
- Reply Later notes and Set Aside context. When you defer a message, a one-line note to future-you about what you owe and why is easy to speak and easy to skip when typing. Speaking it means it actually gets written.
- Notes to self. HEY lets you keep notes on threads and contacts. These are exactly the low-stakes, high-frequency scraps of text that are miserable to type.
What to leave to the keyboard: email addresses, exact URLs, tracking links, and anything with strict formatting. The rule that holds in every email client applies here too — speak the sentences, type the addresses. Dictate the words your recipient reads; type the strings a mail server has to match character for character.
How to dictate in HEY on a Mac
On the desktop, HEY runs in your browser or in its own desktop wrapper. Dictation works the same in both.
Step 1: Install a system-wide voice tool
macOS ships a built-in dictation feature you can turn on in System Settings, and it will type into HEY's composer. It is a fine free starting point. Its weak spots become obvious with daily email, though: it often depends on a network round trip, it fumbles names and industry terms, and it gives you no way to teach it your own vocabulary.
Voice Keyboard Pro is a native Mac app made for this exact job. It sits in your menu bar and works system-wide, so it types into whatever app holds your cursor, HEY included. Hold a hotkey, speak, release, and the text lands where the cursor is. There is no browser extension and no HEY integration to configure.
Step 2: Click into the HEY field
Open a reply, start a new email, or click into the subject line so the cursor is blinking inside the field. Dictation types wherever the cursor sits, so make sure it is inside the box you mean to fill before you start talking.
Step 3: Hold the hotkey and speak your reply
Press and hold your hotkey, say the message in a natural voice, and release. Speak your punctuation where it counts — say "period," "comma," "question mark," and "new paragraph," and they land as marks and breaks, so a two-paragraph reply comes out structured instead of as one wall of text.
Step 4: Read it once, then send
Give the message a quick read. Fix any proper noun that came through wrong and send. For most replies there is nothing to correct, and the whole loop is faster than typing the same message would have been. If you handle a lot of mail across accounts, the same setup already speeds up your other clients too, from Superhuman to Fastmail.
How to dictate in HEY on iPhone and iPad
The HEY mobile app is where triage often happens — screening the Imbox on the go, clearing the Feed, deferring things to Reply Later. It is also where typing is slowest, which makes it the strongest case for voice.
- Install Voice Keyboard Pro from the App Store, add its keyboard in Settings, and allow Full Access so the microphone works. If you have never enabled a third-party keyboard, our guide to turning on Full Access for an iOS keyboard walks through every step.
- Open HEY and tap into a reply, a new email, or the subject line.
- Tap the globe key to switch to the Voice Keyboard Pro keyboard, then tap the mic button.
- Speak. Your words appear in the HEY field as text you can send.
Because it is a keyboard and not a separate app, you never copy and paste between windows. You dictate straight into HEY exactly where you would have typed. That built-in mic button is the entire reason to reach for a voice keyboard for email on iPhone instead of thumb-typing a real reply on a screen keyboard.
Voice and HEY's Reply Later habit
HEY's Reply Later stack is the pile of messages you have decided are worth a real response but not right now. The problem with any defer-it pile is that it grows faster than it shrinks, because clearing it means writing, and writing is the slow part. This is precisely where dictation changes the math.
When you sit down to work your Reply Later stack, dictation lets you clear it at the speed of talking. You open the first message, hold the hotkey, and speak the reply the way you would say it out loud to that person. Then the next. A stack that would have taken forty minutes to type through often clears in a fraction of that, because you are producing words at roughly 130 to 150 a minute instead of the 40 or so a typical person types. The habit that makes HEY work — actually replying rather than letting threads rot — gets easier the moment replying stops being a typing chore.
Teach it your vocabulary
The one thing generic dictation reliably gets wrong is names. The people you email, your company and product names, your acronyms and internal terms — these are the words a general transcription engine has never encountered, and they are the words in nearly every message you write.
Voice Keyboard Pro's Smart Vocabulary fixes this. It is a personal dictionary with replacement rules: you tell it that when you say a certain name it should always be spelled a specific way, and it applies that every time without you correcting it. Add the names of your regular contacts and your product and project terms once, and your dictated replies come out right on the first pass. Across a full Imbox, that saved cleanup is the difference between voice feeling like a shortcut and voice feeling like a hassle.
Cooling down a reply before you send it
Email tempts everyone into firing off a reply while still annoyed. On iPhone, Voice Keyboard Pro's Voice Edit lets you speak a change to text you already dictated instead of selecting and retyping it. You can tell it to make a reply more polite or more concise, and it rewrites the existing text in place. For the message you drafted hot and want to soften before it leaves your Imbox, that is a genuinely useful thirty-second save.
And if you correspond across languages, the two-way translation feature lets you dictate in one language and insert the text in another, across 24 languages, without leaving the composer. A reply spoken in English can be dropped in as French or Portuguese for an international contact.
Is it private enough for email?
A fair question, because email is personal and often sensitive, and HEY's own audience tends to care about this a lot. Voice Keyboard Pro's servers store only operational pings — the minimal signals needed to keep the service running. Your audio and the text of your dictated emails are not retained as content on our servers. That privacy boundary lines up with why many people choose HEY in the first place. As always, check your own employer's policy if you dictate work email on a managed device.
The bottom line
HEY is built to get you to a small pile of messages that deserve a real reply. That is the good version of email, and it is also the version where writing speed matters most, because what is left is all composition. Dictation meets HEY exactly there. You triage with taps and swipes, then you clear the writing at the speed of speech.
Set it up once and it works across every app that takes text, not just HEY. Voice Keyboard Pro has a free tier on both Mac and iPhone, so you can dictate your next few replies and watch your Reply Later stack shrink before you decide it is worth keeping. If HEY got you down to the emails that matter, let your voice handle the part where you answer them.