Voice: dictation & read-aloud

Knobs has voice built in on both directions: dictation turns your speech into text wherever you write, and read-aloud turns mail into audio when your eyes are busy.

Dictation

A mic button appears in the places you write:

• Mail compose — dictate straight into the message body.
• Chat composer — dictate a message before sending.
• Tasks quick-add — speak a task instead of typing it.
• Docs — dictate into the editor at your cursor.

To use it:

1. Click the mic. Your browser may ask for microphone permission the first time.
2. Speak naturally — words appear as you talk, with punctuation added automatically.
3. Click the mic again to stop (or just stop talking; after a long stretch of silence, dictation switches itself off).

While dictating, the mic indicator pulses when it hears you speaking and settles when you pause — so you can always tell whether it’s picking you up. Dictated text is ordinary text: edit, delete, or format it like anything you typed.

Tip

Dictation and typing mix freely — dictate a rough draft, then clean it up by hand, or use Mail’s Improve draft AI action to polish it in one click.

Read-aloud

In Mail, the read-aloud control plays a message or an entire thread as natural-sounding speech:

• Single message — from the message’s toolbar.
• Whole thread — from the thread view, top to bottom.
• Thread summary — if you’ve generated an AI summary of the thread, read-aloud can play the summary instead of the full thread.

Playback is tuned for listening: URLs are spoken as “a link at site,” email addresses and long identifiers are smoothed out, and formatting clutter is skipped — so you hear the message, not the markup. Switching to another message stops playback.

Where voice runs

On web and desktop, audio is processed by Knobs’ servers, so quality and transcription are consistent everywhere and count toward your workspace’s AI usage (see Billing). On iOS, dictation and read-aloud use Apple’s on-device speech — audio never leaves the phone. See Desktop & mobile apps.