Short answer: To dictate in Proton Mail, install Voice Keyboard Pro on your Mac or iPhone. On Mac, click into any Proton Mail compose or reply field, hold your hotkey, and speak; on iPhone, tap the mic on the Voice Keyboard Pro keyboard inside the Proton Mail app. Your speech becomes text at the cursor in about a second.
People choose Proton Mail because they care where their words go. End-to-end encryption, a privacy-first company, servers in Switzerland: the whole point is that your email is your business and nobody else's. So it is a little frustrating that the fastest way to get words into an email, your voice, has usually meant handing your speech to whatever generic dictation tool happens to be lying around, with no idea what it does with the audio afterward.
You should not have to trade away the privacy you deliberately chose just to write faster. This guide covers how to dictate in Proton Mail on both Mac and iPhone, how to keep your emails accurate and well-punctuated, and how to do it with a voice tool that is built to keep your words yours. Speech runs at 130 to 150 words per minute against a typing average near 40, so the upside is real: your inbox stops being a place where you type slowly and becomes a place where you talk it out and move on.
Why dictate your Proton Mail at all?
Email is deceptively heavy work. Most of us underestimate how much of the day disappears into it, one carefully typed reply at a time. A thoughtful message to a colleague, a detailed answer to a client, a long note to a family member: each one is a small writing task, and they add up to hours a week spent at the keyboard.
Dictation changes the economics of that. When you speak a reply instead of typing it, three things tend to happen:
- You go faster. Talking through a paragraph takes a fraction of the time it takes to type it, and the gap widens the longer the email.
- You sound more like yourself. Spoken email tends to read warmer and more natural than the clipped, over-edited prose people produce when every word is a keystroke.
- You stop avoiding the long ones. The email you keep putting off because it needs three real paragraphs becomes a two-minute task when you can simply say the three paragraphs.
Proton Mail gives you all the usual places this helps: the message body, the subject line, replies and forwards, and even notes you keep on your contacts. Anywhere there is a text cursor, you can talk instead of type. If you also live in other inboxes, the same habit carries over to dictating in Outlook, Apple Mail, and Spark.
Dictating in Proton Mail on Mac
Whether you use Proton Mail in a browser or through the desktop app, dictation works the same way, because Voice Keyboard Pro types at the cursor across the whole system. It lives in your menu bar, it does not hook into Proton Mail specifically, and it does not need an extension. Any text field that has focus is fair game.
One-time setup
- Download Voice Keyboard Pro for Mac from voicekeyboardpro.com and move it to your Applications folder.
- Open it once and grant microphone and accessibility permissions when prompted. Accessibility is what lets the app insert text at your cursor inside Proton Mail.
- Choose a hotkey that is comfortable to hold, such as a function key or a spare modifier that will not clash with your other shortcuts.
Dictating an email
- Open Proton Mail and start a new message, or open a reply. Click into the body so the cursor is blinking.
- Hold your hotkey, speak your sentence or paragraph naturally, then release.
- The text appears in the message within about a second. Move to the subject line and do the same. Speak your punctuation, saying "comma," "period," and "new paragraph," to keep the formatting clean as you go.
Because it is system-wide, the same hotkey that writes your Proton Mail also dictates into your calendar, your notes, and your browser. You learn one habit and it follows you into every app. For a broader walkthrough of email dictation technique, our guide to voice typing for emails goes deeper on structure and tone.
Dictating in Proton Mail on iPhone
On the phone, email is where thumb-typing hurts most, and a long reply on a small screen can feel like a chore you would rather defer. Voice Keyboard Pro installs as a custom iOS keyboard with a built-in mic button, so it works right inside the Proton Mail app the same way it works everywhere else.
One-time setup
- Install Voice Keyboard Pro from the App Store.
- Go to Settings → General → Keyboard → Keyboards → Add New Keyboard and add Voice Keyboard Pro.
- Tap it in the list and turn on Allow Full Access, which is what lets the keyboard send your audio for transcription and return text. Our guide on enabling Full Access explains exactly what that permission does.
Dictating an email
- Open the Proton Mail app and start a new message or a reply. Tap into the body.
- Switch to the Voice Keyboard Pro keyboard using the globe key.
- Tap the mic button, speak, and watch your words land. Tap again to stop, then move to the subject line and repeat.
The keyboard does not care which app is open, so the same mic button that answers a Proton Mail thread on the train also writes your next message in any other app. That is the advantage of a keyboard over an app-specific add-on.
Keeping your emails accurate
Email is one of the places where small transcription errors are most visible, because a client or a colleague reads every word. A few habits keep your dictated Proton Mail looking polished:
- Speak punctuation as you go. Saying "comma," "period," "question mark," and "new paragraph" produces properly formatted email rather than a run-on block you have to clean up afterward.
- Dictate in natural chunks. A sentence or two at a time reads back more cleanly than a single breathless paragraph, and it makes any correction a small edit rather than a rewrite.
- Add names to your dictionary. The proper nouns email is full of, colleagues' names, company names, product names, are exactly the words generic dictation gets wrong.
That last point is worth its own tool. Voice Keyboard Pro includes Smart Vocabulary, a personal dictionary with replacement rules. Add the names, companies, and terms that come up in your email, spelled and capitalized the way you want them, and they come out right every time. A contact whose name the engine keeps mishearing, an unusual company name, an industry acronym: add it once and stop correcting it.
Fixing mistakes and writing in other languages
Even with good habits, you will occasionally need to change a word. On iPhone, Voice Keyboard Pro includes Voice Edit: rather than tapping backspace and retyping on a small screen, you speak the correction and the text updates in place. It is a much lighter way to fix a dictated email than nudging a cursor between two letters with your thumb.
Voice Keyboard Pro also does two-way translation while you dictate, across 24 languages. If you correspond with people in another language, you can speak in the language you are comfortable with and have the text appear in theirs, which turns a Proton Mail reply that would have taken a dictionary and twenty minutes into a normal quick response. It is one of the reasons dictation is not just for native English speakers.
Privacy: dictation that respects why you chose Proton
This is the part that matters most for a Proton Mail user, so it deserves to be plain. You picked an email provider that does not read your mail. It would defeat the purpose to speak that same mail into a dictation service that quietly keeps a copy of everything you say.
Voice Keyboard Pro is built so that your dictation content is not stored on our servers. The transcription engine processes your audio to give you back text, and what our backend retains is limited to operational pings, not your audio and not the transcript of what you dictated. The words you speak into a Proton Mail message are not logged, not kept, and not ours to keep. That is the only posture that makes sense for a tool people use to write private email, and it is why privacy-conscious users tend to be comfortable with it. If you want the fuller picture, our overview of private voice to text on Mac lays out the approach.
You chose Proton so your email stays private. A dictation tool that keeps a copy of what you say would undo that. Voice Keyboard Pro does not keep it.
Free tier and Pro
Voice Keyboard Pro has a free tier with a generous daily allowance, which is enough to dictate your next several emails and decide whether talking beats typing for you. If email is a big part of your day and you want voice for all of it, Pro removes the daily limits and unlocks every feature for $4.99 per month or $34.99 per year. A single subscription covers both the Mac app and the iPhone keyboard, so dictating a Proton Mail reply at your desk and answering one from your phone are the same plan.
When speaking your email actually wins
Dictation is not the right tool for every message. A one-line "sounds good, thanks" is faster to type than to speak. But there are a handful of everyday situations where talking beats typing so clearly that once you notice them, you reach for voice automatically:
- The long reply you keep postponing. The message that needs real explanation, the kind you leave sitting in drafts because typing it feels like a project. Spoken, it is three minutes of talking and it is sent.
- Answering from your phone. A detailed Proton Mail reply on a phone keyboard is genuinely unpleasant. The mic button turns a message you would have flagged for later into one you finish on the spot.
- Thinking out loud. Some emails are half decision and half writing. Talking through your reasoning as you dictate often produces a clearer message than staring at a blank compose window trying to type the perfect first sentence.
- Warmer personal notes. A message to a friend or family member reads more like you when you say it than when you type it, because spoken language keeps its rhythm and its small human turns of phrase.
The pattern is the same one people discover with dictation everywhere: it is not about replacing the keyboard, it is about removing the friction from the writing you were already going to do. Your inbox is full of that writing. Speaking it back is simply faster, and in Proton Mail it is faster without giving up the privacy that made you choose the inbox in the first place.
Frequently asked questions
Does dictating in Proton Mail need a browser extension?
No. On Mac, Voice Keyboard Pro types at the cursor across the entire system, so it works in Proton Mail in any browser and in the desktop app with nothing to install per site. On iPhone, it is a keyboard, so it works directly inside the Proton Mail app.
Will my dictated email be stored anywhere?
Your dictation content is not stored on our servers. The transcription engine returns your text, and the backend keeps operational pings only, not your audio and not your transcripts. The words you speak into a Proton Mail message stay yours.
Can I dictate the subject line and body separately?
Yes. Voice Keyboard Pro types wherever the cursor is, so you dictate the body, click or tap into the subject line, and dictate that too. The same goes for replies, forwards, and contact notes.
Does it get names and unusual words right?
Once you add them to Smart Vocabulary, yes. Put the names, companies, and terms your email uses into the personal dictionary with the exact spelling and capitalization, and they come out correctly every time instead of needing a fix.
Can I dictate email in another language?
Yes. Voice Keyboard Pro supports dictation and two-way translation across 24 languages, so you can write a Proton Mail message in a language you are comfortable speaking and have it appear in the recipient's language.
Write your next email out loud
The next Proton Mail reply that has been sitting in your drafts, the one that needs a few real paragraphs, try speaking it instead of typing it. Click into the body, hold your hotkey or tap the mic, and just say what you mean. You get the speed of your voice and the privacy you chose Proton for, at the same time. Download Voice Keyboard Pro and dictate your next private email.