How do sales and support teams use dictation?

Sales and support work is made of short, frequent texts: call notes, follow-up emails, case updates and ticket replies. Dictation can speed those up, but the gain per item is small, and the risks sit in the details a customer cares about. This page covers how much time is saved, where errors appear, and where the audio goes.

Each note saves a little time, and the gain adds up over a day

In a controlled study of short messages on an iPhone, speech reached 153 words per minute and the keyboard reached 52 ^{1 2}. At those speeds, 100 words save about 1.3 minutes compared with typing ³, and the study's speed already counts the time spent correcting errors. Case notes are not short messages, so use the figure as a rough guide. A note of a few hundred words saves a few minutes, and a rep or agent who writes many notes a day will feel the total.

Dictated text leaves more errors, so check the details

In the same phone study, speech produced fewer errors during entry, but it left slightly more in the final text: 1.30 percent uncorrected against 0.79 percent for the keyboard ⁴. That study used a 2016 recognizer, and current engines differ. The lesson still holds. A wrong name, order number or date costs more in a case note than a missing comma. Read each note back and check those fields before you save.

Customer details raise a privacy question

Customer names and account details call for care before they leave your device. On a Mac, Apple says you can check whether general text Dictation is processed on your device and not sent to Siri servers ⁵. Check that setting, and your company's rules on customer data, before you dictate case details. The setting shows what the Mac does. Your company's policy decides what is allowed.

Use the right tool for each part of the job

Microsoft says the dictation feature in Outlook is only available to Microsoft 365 subscribers ⁶, so check the license before a team plans around it. Moving around an application by voice is weaker than typing. In a 2023 PCWorld test, navigating within an application by voice sometimes felt nearly impossible ⁷. In a CRM, that means dictating into the note box and typing or clicking the fields.

Calls and noisy floors

Apple advises that a headset microphone may help when Dictation is used in a noisy environment ⁸. If your floor is noisy, the same advice applies to notes written after a call. For the room side of the question, see whether you can use dictation in an open-plan office.

What the evidence does not show

We looked for independent measurements of how much time sales reps and support agents spend writing notes. The figures we found come from software vendors' surveys and blog posts. We could not open those sources to check them, so we have left them out. Until a measured figure is available for your team, the number you record in your own week is the one to use.

How to measure it in one week

1. Log the minutes spent on notes and follow-ups for five working days.
2. Count the words in a typical note, and total the words for each day.
3. Apply the rough saving of about 1.3 minutes per 100 words as a first estimate, then check it against the minutes you actually save during the dictation week, with editing included.
4. Count how many notes had a wrong name, number or date. If the count is high, slow down the review step before you save more dictated notes.

Our guide on how much time dictation saves at work explains how to turn those minutes into a net figure.

Related questions

• How many hours a week do office workers spend writing?
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