Dictating in your second language, and sending in English
If you work in a language that isn't the one you think in, you're doing two jobs every time you write a message. First you work out what you mean. Then you translate it — carefully, because the stakes are real: an email with clumsy grammar gets read as a clumsy person, which is both unfair and completely standard.
That second job is exhausting, and it makes everything take longer. It also flattens you. The version of you that's funny, precise and quick in your own language arrives in English as someone cautious and formal, because caution is what you can do reliably in a language you learned later.
There's a better arrangement, and it takes about a minute to set up.
Think in yours. Send in theirs.
Talk to WisprBee in the language you actually think in — whichever of 74 it happens to be — and tell it to write in English. You say your thought at full speed, complete with the aside and the joke and the precise word you know in your language and not in the other one. What lands in Slack or in the email is English, properly structured and properly punctuated.
You're not proofreading a translation any more. You're saying what you mean.
Set it per place, and stop thinking about it
The part worth doing on day one: you can set this separately for each kind of writing.
- Personal messages — keep your own language. You don't want your mum getting English.
- Work chat — English, or whatever your team runs on.
- Email — English, and a bit more structured.
- Everywhere else — your call.
Set that once and you never touch it again. You dictate the same way all day and the right language comes out in each place, because the app knows where you're writing.
It keeps up when you switch
Most of us don't stay in one language for a whole day. You take a call in one, reply to a message in another, and switch back mid-sentence. If you've pinned a language and then speak a different one, WisprBee handles it rather than producing nonsense — and then it asks, once, whether you'd like it to stop assuming. Answer once and it stops asking.
Three things that make it noticeably better
Teach it the names first. Your company, your colleagues, your clients, your city. Names are what any voice tool struggles with most, and in a second-language context a mangled name is the difference between a professional message and a confusing one. Add a few, or just fix them as they come up — it remembers either way.
Don't slow down for it. The instinct is to speak carefully and simply, the way you'd type in your second language. Don't. Speak at your normal speed, in your own language, with your normal complexity. That's the whole advantage.
Say the tone you want. For anything sensitive, you can tell it what you're going for before you start — warmer, more formal, shorter. You know exactly what impression you want to make; you just don't want to have to hand-build the sentences that make it.
What actually changes
Not just speed, though writing gets much faster. What changes is that the version of you that arrives in English is closer to the version of you that exists.