Short answer: Loom has no built-in dictation, but any text field in Loom will accept voice. On Mac, install Voice Keyboard Pro, click into the title, description, comment, or CTA box, hold your hotkey, speak, and release. On iPhone, switch to the Voice Keyboard Pro keyboard and tap its mic button.
Loom is a video-first tool, so it is easy to forget how much typing it still asks of you. Every recording needs a title. Good ones need a description so the viewer knows what they are about to watch. Then come the comments, the reply threads, the call-to-action buttons, the workspace notes, and the little messages you send when you share a link. None of that is video. All of it is text, and all of it slows down the exact thing Loom is supposed to make fast: getting a message out of your head and to another person.
The whole appeal of async video is that you can explain something out loud in ninety seconds instead of writing three paragraphs. So it is a little absurd to record a crisp, spoken walkthrough and then spend two minutes typing a title and description with your thumbs or hunting across a keyboard. If you already talked through the content, you should be able to talk through the metadata too. This guide covers exactly how to do that on both Mac and iPhone, which fields are worth dictating, and the habits that keep the whole workflow quick.
Why Loom has no dictation of its own
Loom is a web app on the desktop and a native app on mobile, and neither ships a microphone button for its text fields. That is not an oversight so much as a scope decision. Loom's job is to record your screen and your voice into a shareable video; the text boxes around that video are ordinary form fields. When you want to fill them by voice, the dictation has to come from the operating system or from a keyboard-level tool, not from Loom.
This is the same situation you run into with most modern web apps. The good news is that it also means the fix is universal: whatever lets you dictate into one text box on your Mac or iPhone will let you dictate into every text box, Loom included. You set it up once and it works in Loom, in your email client, in your notes, and everywhere else. There is nothing Loom-specific to configure.
The text fields in Loom worth dictating
Before the how, it helps to know where voice actually pays off. Not every field is worth the effort, and a few are better left to the keyboard.
- Video title. The single highest-value field. A vague title like "Quick update" gets ignored; a specific one like "How I restructured the onboarding flow and why" gets opened. Titles are a full sentence's worth of thought, and speaking them tends to produce clearer, more descriptive phrasing than typing does.
- Description. This is where async video quietly wins or loses. A two- or three-line description that says what the video covers, what you need from the viewer, and by when turns a passive watch into an action. People skip descriptions because typing them feels like extra homework after recording. Dictation removes that friction entirely.
- Comments and reply threads. Loom conversations happen in the comments under a video. These are exactly the kind of short, frequent messages that are miserable to type and effortless to speak.
- Call-to-action text. If you add a CTA button or link, the label and any accompanying note are quick voice wins.
- Share messages. The note you attach when you send a Loom to someone by email or chat is prose, and prose is what voice is best at.
What to leave to the keyboard: anything with exact characters that must be right the first time. URLs, tracking parameters, timestamps you want to reference precisely, and any structured field with a strict format. The reliable rule across every app is speak the sentences, type the symbols. Say the words a human reads; type the codes a machine parses.
How to dictate in Loom on a Mac
Loom on the desktop runs in your browser or in the Loom desktop app, and dictation works the same in both because the text fields behave identically.
Step 1: Install a system-wide voice tool
macOS has a built-in dictation feature you can toggle in System Settings, and it will type into Loom's fields. It is a reasonable free starting point. Its limits show up quickly, though: it often needs an internet round trip, it can stumble on names and product jargon, and it gives you no way to teach it the vocabulary specific to your team.
Voice Keyboard Pro is a native Mac app built for exactly this. It lives in your menu bar, and it works system-wide, which means it types into any app that has a cursor, Loom included. You hold a hotkey, speak, release, and the text appears where your cursor is. No plugin, no browser extension, nothing Loom needs to know about.
Step 2: Click into the Loom field you want to fill
Open the video you just recorded, or the comment box, or the share dialog. Click directly into the text field so the cursor is blinking inside it. This is the step people skip: dictation types wherever the cursor is, so if the cursor is not in the box, the text lands somewhere unexpected.
Step 3: Hold the hotkey and speak
Press and hold your Voice Keyboard Pro hotkey, say your title or description in a natural voice, and release. The text appears in the Loom field. Speak your punctuation where it matters — say "period" and "comma" and "new line" and they land as the marks and breaks you meant, so a two-sentence description comes out formatted rather than as one long run-on.
Step 4: Glance, tidy, save
Read the result once. If a proper noun came through wrong, fix that one word and move on. For a title or a short description, you will usually have nothing to fix. The whole loop takes a few seconds, which is the point.
How to dictate in Loom on iPhone and iPad
The Loom mobile app is where a lot of quick captures and comment replies happen, and it is also where typing is slowest. This is the strongest case for voice.
- Install Voice Keyboard Pro from the App Store and add its keyboard in Settings, then allow Full Access so the mic can work. If you have not enabled a third-party keyboard before, our walkthrough on how to enable Full Access for an iOS keyboard covers every tap.
- Open Loom and tap into any text field — a comment, a video title, a share note.
- Tap the globe key to switch to the Voice Keyboard Pro keyboard, then tap the mic button.
- Speak. Your words appear in the Loom field as text.
Because it is a keyboard rather than a separate app, there is no copying and pasting between windows. You dictate straight into Loom the same way you would type, just faster. The built-in mic button is the whole reason to use a keyboard with a microphone instead of fighting with the tiny on-screen keys.
The workflow that keeps async video actually fast
Dictation is a tool, but the real speed comes from a habit. Here is the loop that works for people who send a lot of Looms.
Record first, name it out loud second
The moment you stop recording, your explanation is still fresh in your head. That is the best time to dictate the title and description, not later when you have moved on. Stop the recording, click the title field, and speak the one sentence that tells someone why they should watch. Then click the description and speak the two lines that tell them what to do. You are done with the metadata in under fifteen seconds, while the thinking is still warm.
Treat the description as the instruction, not decoration
The most useful Loom descriptions answer three things: what this covers, what I need from you, and by when. Spoken aloud, that is one breath: "This walks through the new invoice layout. Let me know if the totals column looks right to you by Thursday." Typing that feels like a chore, so people skip it, and the video lands without a clear ask. Speaking it costs nothing, so it actually gets written.
Reply to comments in the app, by voice
Loom threads tend to die because replying means typing on a phone. When replying is as easy as tapping a mic and talking, threads stay alive and decisions get made in the comments instead of spilling into yet another meeting. If you already lean on async to cut meetings, this is where a lot of the savings actually come from. Readers who came to Loom to reduce live calls often pair it with a no-bot meeting notes approach for the calls that do still happen.
Teach it your team's vocabulary
The one thing generic dictation gets wrong is names. Your product names, your teammates' names, your internal project code names, your acronyms — these are exactly the words a general transcription engine has never seen, and they are exactly the words that show up in every Loom title and description you write.
Voice Keyboard Pro's Smart Vocabulary solves this. It is a personal dictionary with replacement rules: you tell it that when you say a certain phrase, it should always be written a specific way. Add your product names, your recurring project code names, and the spellings people always get wrong, and they come out right every time without you fixing them. For a tool you use dozens of times a day, that saved correction adds up fast.
Fixing a title without retyping it
Sometimes you dictate a description and realize the tone is off, or you want to swap a word. On iPhone, Voice Keyboard Pro's Voice Edit lets you speak the change instead of selecting text and retyping it. You can tell it to make a line more concise or to replace a phrase, and it edits the existing text in place. It is a small feature that removes the most annoying part of dictation, which is the cleanup afterward.
And if your audience is not all English speakers, the two-way translation feature dictates in one language and inserts the text in another across 24 languages. A description written once in English can be spoken again and dropped in as Spanish or German for a global team, without leaving the field.
Is it private enough for work videos?
Reasonable question, because Loom videos are often internal and sometimes sensitive. Voice Keyboard Pro's servers store only operational pings — the lightweight signals needed to run the service. Your audio and the text you dictate are not kept as content on our servers. For titles and descriptions of internal work videos, that boundary matters, and it is worth confirming against your own employer's policy on which tools are approved for work content.
Loom's own transcript is a different thing
One point of confusion worth clearing up: Loom generates a transcript of what you said in the video. That is Loom transcribing your recording after the fact. Dictation is the opposite direction — you speaking to fill the text fields around the video in real time. They solve different problems. Loom's transcript makes your video searchable and skimmable; dictation makes writing the title, description, and comments fast. You use both, for different reasons.
The bottom line
Loom exists because talking is faster than writing. It is strange, then, to record a spoken message and immediately switch back to typing for everything around it. Voice dictation closes that gap. You speak the video, and you speak the title, the description, and the replies too. The whole interaction stays at the speed of talking, which is roughly 130 to 150 words a minute against the 40 or so that most people type.
Set it up once and it works everywhere text goes, not just in Loom. Voice Keyboard Pro has a free tier on both Mac and iPhone, so you can dictate your next Loom title and description and feel the difference before deciding it is worth keeping. If you send video to move work forward, keep the text moving at the same speed.