Short answer: To dictate in Superhuman, place your cursor in a compose or reply window and use a voice input tool. Apple Dictation works but drops punctuation and pauses. A system-wide voice keyboard like Voice Keyboard Pro dictates full emails at speaking speed with punctuation, keeping Superhuman's keyboard-first speed intact.
Superhuman built its whole reputation on speed. Keyboard shortcuts for everything, an inbox you can fly through, replies sent in seconds. Its users are people who treat email as a performance sport — founders, executives, salespeople, investors — and they measure their day partly by how fast they can clear the inbox. So it is a little ironic that the slowest part of the whole system is still the one thing Superhuman can't speed up for you: actually typing the words.
That is where dictation comes in. If you can speak your replies instead of typing them, you close the last gap between how fast Superhuman lets you move and how fast you can produce the actual sentences. This guide covers every practical way to dictate in Superhuman on both Mac and iPhone, why the built-in option holds you back, and how a proper voice keyboard fits into a keyboard-first workflow without slowing you down.
Why dictation belongs in a Superhuman workflow
Consider the arithmetic. A fast typist runs at 80 to 100 words per minute. Most people type meaningfully slower than that, somewhere near the 40-words-per-minute adult average. Comfortable speech runs at 130 to 150 words per minute. When you are answering fifty emails a day, that difference is not a rounding error — it is the difference between spending an hour on your inbox and spending twenty-five minutes.
Superhuman already stripped out the interface friction. There is no mouse-hunting for the reply button, no waiting on a slow web client, no clutter. What remains is composition itself. Dictation attacks exactly that remaining cost. And because Superhuman is so keyboard-driven, a hold-to-talk voice tool slots in naturally: you are already keeping your hands on the keys and moving through the inbox with shortcuts, so adding a single hotkey that turns your voice into text feels like a natural extension rather than a new mode. If email volume is your real bottleneck, our broader look at voice typing for emails lays out the productivity case in detail.
Method 1: Apple Dictation inside Superhuman
Superhuman runs as a desktop app on the Mac and as a native app on iPhone, and Apple Dictation works in text fields in both. It is the free, already-installed starting point.
On the Mac
- Open System Settings → Keyboard and turn Dictation on.
- Set or note the shortcut that starts dictation — often pressing Control twice, or a dedicated dictation key.
- In Superhuman, open a compose window or hit reply so your cursor is in the message body.
- Trigger dictation and speak. Say "comma", "period", and "new paragraph" out loud, because it won't add punctuation on its own.
On the iPhone
- Open Superhuman and start a reply or new message.
- Tap the microphone key on the standard iOS keyboard.
- Speak, then tap the keyboard icon to stop.
For a one-line "sounds good, let's do Thursday" this is perfectly adequate. The trouble starts when your emails are longer, more frequent, or full of names and terms that generic dictation doesn't know.
Where built-in dictation slows a Superhuman user down
The whole point of Superhuman is to remove friction. Apple Dictation quietly adds some back:
- It pauses out from under you. Stop to think about how to phrase something diplomatically — which you do constantly in real email — and the session cuts off. You restart, lose your rhythm, and the speed advantage evaporates. This is the same timeout problem we cover in why Mac dictation cuts off mid-sentence.
- Punctuation is manual. Speaking every comma and period is workable for one sentence and exhausting across a full inbox. It also pulls your attention away from tone, which matters more in email than almost anywhere else.
- Names get destroyed. Client names, company names, product names, colleagues on the thread — the exact words that appear in every business email — are where generic dictation fails hardest. Sending a client's name misspelled is worse than a typo; it reads as carelessness.
- It never learns. Correct the same recipient's name every day and it will still be wrong tomorrow. There is nothing to teach and nothing that improves.
For someone whose entire tooling choice is about shaving seconds, these are exactly the wrong tradeoffs.
Method 2: A system-wide voice keyboard
The better fit for a Superhuman user is a voice layer that works everywhere on the system, including inside Superhuman, with a single consistent trigger. That is what Voice Keyboard Pro does.
On the Mac, it lives in your menu bar. You hold a hotkey, speak, and release, and the text appears at your cursor — inside a Superhuman reply, a compose window, the subject line, wherever the cursor sits. Because it operates at the system level, Superhuman is treated like any other app. There is no plugin to install and nothing to copy across. Hit reply with a Superhuman shortcut, hold your dictation hotkey, speak the message, release, and send — all without your hands leaving the keyboard.
Two features matter most for email specifically:
- Automatic punctuation. Voice Keyboard Pro's transcription engine adds commas, periods, question marks, and paragraph breaks based on how you naturally speak. Your emails come out formatted and readable, so you can dictate the way you'd dictate to an assistant rather than narrating grammar.
- A personal dictionary. With Smart Vocabulary you add the names and terms you use every day — clients, colleagues, your company's product names, industry acronyms — with replacement rules so they transcribe correctly every single time. For anyone in sales or client work, getting names right automatically is the difference between dictation you trust and dictation you have to babysit.
On the iPhone, Voice Keyboard Pro is a custom keyboard with a built-in microphone button. Switch to it inside Superhuman on your phone, tap the mic, and speak your reply directly into the message. If you clear your inbox from your phone between meetings, this turns dead time into done email. Our roundup of the best voice keyboard for iPhone explains how the custom-keyboard approach differs from Apple's built-in mic.
Setting it up for Superhuman
Mac
- Install Voice Keyboard Pro and grant microphone and accessibility permissions.
- Choose a hold-to-talk hotkey that won't collide with Superhuman's own shortcuts — a modifier you don't otherwise use is ideal.
- In Superhuman, open a reply so the cursor is in the body.
- Hold the hotkey, speak the email, release. Review, then send with your usual Superhuman shortcut.
- Add your frequent contacts and product names to Smart Vocabulary so they transcribe correctly from day one.
iPhone
- Install the Voice Keyboard Pro app and add its keyboard under Settings → General → Keyboard → Keyboards. Enable Full Access — here's why that's required for the mic to work.
- Open Superhuman and start a reply.
- Tap the globe key to switch to Voice Keyboard Pro.
- Tap the microphone and speak your message straight into the thread.
Getting email dictation right
Match your tone to the recipient
Email lives and dies on tone. The advantage of dictation is that spoken language is naturally more conversational and warmer than the stiff phrasing people default to when typing. Lean into that for relationship emails. For formal notes, do a quick read-through before sending — dictation captures your voice faithfully, which means it also captures your filler words if you don't tidy them. Because Voice Keyboard Pro preserves exactly what you say, a five-second edit pass is usually all it takes.
Dictate the body, keep shortcuts for everything else
The smart division of labor in Superhuman is to keep using keyboard shortcuts for navigation, addressing, and sending, and use voice only for the message body — the part that actually contains words. This keeps you inside Superhuman's fast lane and only reaches for voice where it genuinely wins. You archive, reply, and send at keyboard speed, and you compose at speaking speed.
Front-load your vocabulary
Spend ten minutes adding your top clients, teammates, and product names to your personal dictionary before you rely on dictation for real email. That upfront investment pays back every time a name transcribes perfectly instead of needing a correction. For people who email the same fifty names all week, this is the highest-leverage setup step.
Use it for the emails you dread
The longer and more thoughtful an email needs to be, the more dictation helps — and the more likely you are to put it off. The apology, the detailed proposal, the careful update to a nervous client: these are exactly where speaking beats typing, because you can talk through a nuanced message far more fluidly than you can type it. Dictation is quietly one of the best cures for email procrastination.
Troubleshooting Superhuman dictation
Dictation stops mid-email
That is Apple Dictation timing out on a pause. A hold-to-talk voice keyboard doesn't do this — the session runs as long as you hold the key, so thinking mid-sentence never ends it.
Text appears in the wrong field
Make sure your cursor is in the message body, not on the subject line or a Superhuman command bar, before you start speaking. Click into the body first, then trigger dictation.
A recipient's name keeps coming out wrong
Add it to the personal dictionary once with the correct spelling as its replacement rule. From then on it transcribes correctly. With Apple Dictation there is simply no way to fix a recurring name error — there is nothing to teach.
The iPhone keyboard won't dictate
Confirm Full Access is enabled for the keyboard; without it a third-party keyboard cannot use the microphone. If you just switched keyboards, tap back into the message body and make sure Voice Keyboard Pro is active before tapping the mic.
Is it worth it for Superhuman users?
If your email volume is light, Apple Dictation is a fine free option and there is no reason to add anything. But Superhuman users are, almost by definition, high-volume email people who already pay for speed. For them, the gap between generic dictation and a voice tool built for real work compounds across every message: automatic punctuation, a dictionary that knows your contacts, and a session that doesn't quit when you pause add up to email you can genuinely speak as fast as you think it.
Voice Keyboard Pro has a free tier, so you can wire it into your own Superhuman workflow and clear a few threads by voice before deciding. Time yourself against a typed inbox session and see where you land. For people whose whole tooling philosophy is about removing friction, adding voice to the one part Superhuman couldn't speed up is a natural next move. Pro is $4.99 a month or $34.99 a year for unlimited dictation, the personal dictionary, and the iPhone keyboard.
Superhuman made moving through email fast. Dictation makes writing it fast. Put the two together and the inbox stops being the thing that eats your morning. If you also live in other mail clients, our guides on how to dictate emails in Outlook on Mac and how to dictate in Apple Mail cover the same voice-first approach in those apps.