Writing in a second language is hard work. Even when your English is fluent, getting from "understandable" to "polished" takes effort: second-guessing prepositions, articles and tenses, rereading every sentence before you hit Send.
AI dictation doesn't make that effort disappear, but it can take a good share of it off your plate. You speak naturally, mistakes and all, and the software cleans up the grammar and spelling before the text appears. Here's what it fixes, what it can't, and how to get the most out of it.
The Old Grind vs. The AI Workflow#
The Old Grind#
- Draft: think of the sentence, often in your first language.
- Translate: convert it in your head.
- Type: hammer it out, second-guessing the spelling.
- Edit: run it through a grammar checker or an AI rewriter.
- Ship: finally send the email.
The AI Workflow#
- Speak: say the thought out loud, without stopping to fix mistakes.
- Cleanup: the app removes filler words, applies your self-corrections and fixes grammar and spelling.
- Check: read it once and fix anything that's off.
- Ship: send it.
It's fewer steps, not magic. Speaking is generally quicker than typing (a Stanford University, University of Washington and Baidu study found speech input about three times faster than typing on a smartphone keyboard), and you skip the separate grammar pass. Step 3 is still yours, though.
How LumeVoice Handles Accents and Imperfect Grammar#
Built-in dictation, like Apple Dictation or Windows voice typing, writes down what it hears. If you use the wrong tense or stumble over a phrase, it types the mistake. That's the right behaviour for a transcriber, but it leaves all the grammar to you. (One exception, as of October 2026: on Copilot+ PCs, Fluid dictation in Windows voice typing corrects grammar, punctuation and filler words in English.)
LumeVoice works in two steps. First, speech recognition with Whisper large-v3-turbo, an OpenAI model trained on a very large and varied set of multilingual audio collected from the web (OpenAI's paper). Then a language model cleans the text up: it removes filler words, applies your self-corrections and fixes grammar and spelling, while keeping what you meant.
If you say:
"I think we should for the meeting tomorrow talk about the new pricing page, maybe 3 PM is good?"
You'll get something like this (an illustration, not a test result):
"I think we should talk about the new pricing page at the meeting tomorrow. Maybe 3 PM?"
Notice what it doesn't do: it doesn't invent details. Had you said "the new thing" instead of "the new pricing page", it couldn't know what you meant, so the vague phrase would stay. Name things specifically and the cleanup has something to work with.
Ready to Write English with Less Effort?
Try LumeVoice with your own voice. It starts with 3,000 free words, no card required, on Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android.
3 Hacks for Dictating with an Accent#
- Stop over-pronouncing: you don't need to sound like a news anchor. Whisper learned from everyday audio collected from the web, not studio recordings, so natural speech at your normal pace usually works best.
- Give it context: speak in full sentences and use specific nouns. The surrounding words help the model work out a word you pronounced differently, and the cleanup can only fix what's there.
- Teach it your words: in the Mac and Windows apps, add names, product names and technical terms to LumeVoice's dictionary so they're spelled right every time. You can also pick a writing style for each kind of app, for example something more casual in chat apps and the Default style in email.
Is This "Cheating"?#
No more than a spell-checker is. If you're a brilliant developer or founder, your value is your ideas, not your ability to conjugate English verbs perfectly on the first try. The words and the meaning are still yours; the tool tidies the grammar.
Read the result before you send it, because you're responsible for what it says. Over time, seeing your own sentences corrected is also a decent way to notice the mistakes you make most often.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does it work with heavy accents?
It works with many accents, but no speech engine handles every accent equally well, and results also depend on your microphone and your room. The only reliable test is your own voice: use the free words to dictate a few paragraphs you'd normally write, and see how much you'd have to fix.
Which languages does it support?
LumeVoice works in 100 languages. By default it writes in the language you speak, so you can dictate in English for English-speaking colleagues and in your first language for everyone else.
Will it change what I meant?
It's built not to. The cleanup fixes grammar, spelling and punctuation, removes filler words and applies your self-corrections, but it keeps your meaning and doesn't summarise or add content. It's still software, so read the result before you send it.
Related Guides#
- How to fix poor dictation accuracy on Mac
- How to choose an accurate dictation app for Mac
- LumeVoice for students
- How to write emails faster by voice
- The best talk-to-text apps
- Best Apps for Dyslexia in 2026: Reading and Writing Tools, Ranked
- Best Dictation Apps for Accented English in 2026 (and How to Get Better Results)
- Best Spanish Speech to Text Apps in 2026: Free and Paid Options
- Tools for Dysgraphia: Assistive Tech for Handwriting and Typing in 2026
