Writing at the Speed of Thought? 27 Days with Wispr Flow

I’m currently writing this review without touching my keyboard.

They say the only real way to review a product is to actually use it, so I decided to write this entire first draft using Wispr Flow. It’s a voice-to-text AI designed to turn natural speech into polished writing across Mac, Windows, and mobile. After 27 days of testing—mostly on my iPhone but finishing here on my Mac—I wanted to see if it actually lived up to the “4x faster than typing” hype.

In short, yes, Wispr Flow lives up to its claim of being a voice-to-text AI that turns speech into clear, polished writing in every app. It’s impressive how fast it can transcribe your speech into text, and it really does get rid of any filler words that you might type in. It usually catches when you correct yourself while talking. So I can ramble endlessly, and Wispr Flow polishes it for me.

It really is an enhanced version of using voice dictation tools like traditional Apple dictation. I don’t like sending voice messages on apps like WhatsApp or iMessage, so being able to dictate what I want to say and having it transcribed without any of the filler is really great! I don’t have to worry about punctuation marks or any of that stuff. It saves me time, genuinely saves me time, because otherwise I would be typing things out. Sometimes I can type out messages that are more than a few sentences, so it’s definitely a time saver in that case.

Alternate State of Mind

One thing I did notice is that my mental flow when I’m typing is not the same one as when I’m transcribing. If I treat Wispr Flow as if I was recording a voice message, it doesn’t always translate into text that makes sense because the way we talk is not always the way we type or write. At first, it was a challenge to get my mind into the right flow—I’m not recording a voice message. I am transcribing a message or writing a message that will be transcribed.

This eventually turned into a benefit of using Wispr Flow because it leads to more natural sounding text. To be honest, it’s not something that I paid too much attention to during my usage but I am now realizing how it’s changed how I dictate while writing this review.

Puerto Rican Spanish vs. AI

That’s not to say that I didn’t have friction points while using Wispr Flow. My main issue was when I used it in Spanish. My Puerto Rican accent has some quirks that Wispr Flow never quite picked up on, and it did lead to me using it less for Spanish transcription. I don’t know if eventually it would have learned to transcribe my Spanish better.

There are three quirks to Puerto Rican Spanish that are particularly relevant here:

• Dropped or Aspirated ‘S’: We often say “gracia” instead of “gracias.”
• The ‘R’ to ‘L’ Swap: Final ‘r’ sounds are frequently replaced with an ‘l’, turning “amor” into “amol.”
• Omitted Intervocalic ‘D’: We tend to skip the ‘d’ between vowels, so “hablado” becomes “hablao.”

While these aren’t dealbreakers, they did lead to me using the app less for Spanish. Because Wispr Flow didn’t quite catch these nuances, I often had to go back and manually edit the text. In those moments, it actually would have been faster to just type the message out from the start.

For my bilingual people, you can totally talk in Spanglish and it gets it. I actually didn’t have any issues with Spanglish! You can start escribiendo en inglés and then do some Spanglish mid-sentence, and terminar en español, e intercambiar y there is no problem.

Mobile Pain Points

As for the desktop experience vs. the mobile experience, there are some frictions on mobile, but they are limitations of the iOS ecosystem. Some apps you can start Flow instantly and keep going; other apps it switches to Flow and then you have to swipe back, but that is just a limitation of iOS.

I wish that switching to the alphabetic keyboard did not revert back to the iOS keyboard, or at least it adds friction when you are not transcribing. The Wispr Flow keyboard only shows numbers and symbols, so if you need to tweak a word, you need to go back to the iOS keyboard. That adds a little bit of friction.

The Desktop Experience

On desktop, it is pretty nice. You can either hold down the function or the globe key and start dictating, and as soon as you let it go, it will transcribe your text. If it turns into a long sentence, then you can press space and then you no longer need to hold down the function key, or there is a tiny little bar that pops up at the bottom of your screen. You can tap on it there and click on it, and you can start dictating. To stop, you just need to press the little stop button. The experience on desktop is a little bit more seamless, and I actually enjoyed using it on desktop!

Transcription Speed

I only have good things to say about the speed of the transcriptions! Most of the time, as soon as you stop transcribing, your text appears on screen. The few times that it doesn’t, it just takes one maybe two seconds. If there are any network errors or issues and it wasn’t able to transcribe, it does save your audio in the app so you can go back and have it transcribe it—so you never really lose what you said. You just need to go back and find it.

And honestly, it deals with my ramblings pretty well. I don’t like when apps stop transcribing because I take a moment to collect my thoughts, but Wispr Flow waits for me. It doesn’t stop transcribing the moment I stop talking, so that is nice. It gives me a moment to collect my thoughts. More often than not, it gets what I said right. My main issues have been using it in Spanish, but I would say I type/dictate about 70% of what I write in English and the other 30% in Spanish, so not really a deal breaker.

The Dictionary

Now, this is something where perhaps I was using it wrong or it just didn’t work, but it’s hard to add a word to your dictionary if it doesn’t get transcribed correctly in the first place. I never really saw how to use that feature, and over the past 27 days my dictionary hasn’t really updated itself, which leads me to believe that it’s a manual feature.

I would like to be able to see a list of words that Wispr Flow wasn’t sure about when transcribing somewhere in the app. Have it prompt me, “Hey, we weren’t quite sure what you were trying to say with these words. Did we get it right, or would you like to add them to your dictionary?” That feature would be really cool, and if it already exists, please don’t jump me, but I never saw it during my time using the app.

Snippets

The other feature that Wispr Flow has is snippets, and I’ll be honest, I don’t have a use case for them. I don’t typically write the same things over and over, so I didn’t test this feature out in real-life usage because it wasn’t for me—but as far as testing for this review, it does work.

For example, if I say “my email address”, it would output my email address. It works just like custom AutoCorrect snippets.

Use Cases

One workflow that Wispr Flow has replaced for me is sometimes I dictate stuff on the Voice Memos app on my iPhone, and then most of the time I struggle getting a clean transcription of the recording. Wispr Flow has cleaned up that workflow for me, because instead of using the Voice Memos app, I dictate straight into my Notes app and because it’s already cleaned up, I don’t have to deal with a raw transcription. That’s one of the use cases I’ve used it most.

I used it to write the first draft of this review. Afterwards, I edited it without Wispr Flow, but I got 90% of the way there with it. I got close to 1,800 words with Wispr Flow on the first draft with minimal corrections.

Who’s It For

I would say Wispr Flow is for people who spend a lot of time typing. Creatives that run blogs, newsletters or write books. People who write a lot of emails at work. If you usually say what you’re typing out loud, you’re going to love it!

For the casual user that just wants an enhanced version of Apple’s dictation feature or is tired of sending voice messages, Wispr Flow could work. The free tier is pretty generous and includes:

• 2,000 words per week on Mac or Windows
• 1,000 words per week on Flow for iPhone
• Unlimited words per week on Android (limited time only)
• Custom dictionary and snippets
• Support for 100+ languages
• Privacy mode (Zero Data Retention) — I suggest enabling this if you don’t want your data used for training
• HIPAA-ready

In my 27 days of basic usage, including writing this review, I’ve dictated 3,154 words. So whether the free tier is enough for you is going to depend a lot on the usage that you give it.

Using this review as an example, I dictated close to 1,700 words for the first draft, so you would use up your weekly limit if you dictated this on Mac or Windows. It would not have been enough if you were to use it on your iPhone, so take that into consideration.

The Pro tier with unlimited usage starts at $12 a month or $144 a year, so it’s not exactly cheap. If you’re past the weekly usage limits, you’re going to have to weigh the pros and cons and decide if it’s for you.

A quick side-note if you’re on Android: since it was just released on Android, it’s free and unlimited during launch—so it’s definitely worth checking out at a minimum.

Where it might be a deal-killer for some is that it is cloud-based. If you don’t have an internet connection, you’re not going to be able to use Wispr Flow. If you’re on a plane or out in the country, then you won’t be able to use it, and you might want to consider other offline alternatives.

The Verdict

Would I recommend Wispr Flow? At the beginning of this review, I wasn’t entirely sure, but the more I wrote about it, the more I realized that I did enjoy my experience with it over the past month. Yes, I would recommend it, especially if your usage is going to be within the free tier. I’m still not sure if the $144 a year is worth it, but I could change my mind down the line if I do find myself using it so much that I hit the usage limits.

If you want to give it a try, use my referral link: wisprflow.ai/r?ANTONIO3100. You get a free month of Pro, and I get a free month of Pro after you dictate 2,000 words.