Use cases
Product managers: the job is writing, between meetings
A PM's calendar leaves fifteen-minute gaps and their output is documents. Dictation is the only thing that fits written work into the shape of that day.
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The four things that always slip
| Artefact | Why it slips | Spoken in |
|---|---|---|
| Customer call notes | The next meeting starts in four minutes | 90 seconds |
| The decision and the rejected options | Nobody's job, so nobody's time | 2 minutes |
| The "why" paragraph at the top of a spec | Feels optional next to the requirements | 60 seconds |
| The weekly update | Competes with the actual work | 3 minutes |
All four are prose, all four are written from memory, and all four are worth more the sooner they are written. That combination is precisely what dictation is for.
Customer calls: dictate before the next one starts
A discovery call produces one or two genuinely useful sentences — a phrase the customer used, the workaround they built, the thing they said in passing that reframes the problem. Those survive about twenty minutes.
Written at the end of the day
Good call. They want better reporting. Following up.
Dictated at 11:04, straight after the call
They do not want better reporting — they want to stop being asked for it. Their finance lead pulls the same three numbers into a spreadsheet every Monday and emails it to four people, and has done for two years. They described it as "the Monday tax". The feature request they filed was for a CSV export, but the actual job is the email. Worth checking how many other accounts have a Monday ritual like this before we build anything.
Fifty seconds of speaking. The second version is the difference between building a CSV export and building the right thing.
The decision record
The highest-leverage two minutes in product management: recording what was decided, by whom, and what was rejected and why. Almost nobody does it, because typing it competes with the next meeting.
Six weeks later someone reopens the question. A written record ends it in thirty seconds. An unwritten one costs a meeting, and the argument is reconstructed from three people's incompatible memories.
Specs: speak the reasoning, type the structure
A spec has two halves. The structured half — requirements, acceptance criteria, edge cases, tables — is fast to type and awkward to speak. The prose half — the context, the problem, the reasoning, the things deliberately out of scope — is slow to type and natural to speak.
Dictate the second half first, then build the structure around it. Most specs are written the other way round, which is why so many have thorough requirements and no explanation of why the thing exists.
AI prompts, which is the other half
PMs lean heavily on AI for drafting, summarising and stress-testing. The quality of what comes back tracks the quality of the prompt, and typed prompts are short because typing is slow.
Speaking a sixty-word prompt with the constraints, the audience and the things to avoid takes twelve seconds and produces something you can use rather than something you have to rewrite. See dictating better prompts.
Setting it up
- Teach it your product vocabulary Feature names, internal codenames, customer names, the acronyms your company invented. A PM's writing is unusually dense with them.
- Make a call-note snippet Headings: what they said, what they meant, what surprised me, what to check. Then dictate into each.
- Make a decision-record snippet Decided, by, options rejected, revisit if. Two minutes of speaking fills it.
- Dictate into whatever you already use Notion, Linear, Confluence, Jira, Google Docs — a system-wide app types into all of them with no integration.
- Build the after-the-call habit Note dictated before the next meeting. This is harder than any of the above and it is the whole benefit.
Questions
Can I dictate into Notion, Linear, Jira and Confluence?
Yes, all of them, with no integration. A system-wide dictation app types where your cursor is, so web apps and desktop apps behave identically.
Should I dictate the whole spec?
No. Dictate the prose — context, problem, reasoning, out of scope — and type the structured parts. Requirements tables and acceptance criteria are faster typed and awkward spoken.
Is it safe to dictate customer call notes?
With on-device recognition, the audio is not transmitted, so the customer's name and what they told you are not disclosed to a transcription vendor. The note then lives wherever you typed it.
What about during the call?
Take rough notes by hand or keyboard during the call and dictate the real version immediately after. Dictating while someone is talking does not work and is rude.