Dictate a client follow-up from your meeting notes

Voice typing turns spoken words into written text. Apple calls its built-in Mac feature Dictation. For a consultant, a useful place to start is a follow-up paragraph based on the meeting notes.

Keep the notes beside your draft, say the agreed next steps aloud, and use Noats to insert the dictated text. Compare the draft with the notes and check names, numbers and commitments before sending. That review covers both recognition mistakes and wording that changes the agreement.

Choose a passage with a clear action, an owner and a deadline. Include any condition attached to the decision, such as a budget awaiting approval. These details give you something specific to say and a source against which to check the resulting draft.

Speak from the commitments in your notes

Noats requires Apple silicon with macOS 14.2 or later. On a compatible Mac, prepare a draft and keep the relevant note available for comparison. The fictional example below follows one proposed budget and one promised deliverable from a short note into a reviewed client message.

Maya. Revised scope Friday. Proposed budget £4,800. Approval pending.

Before speaking, confirm who owns the action. For this example, the consultant is responsible for sending the revised scope and Maya is responsible for approving the proposal. If your own shorthand leaves ownership unclear, check the fuller meeting record before assigning a promise to yourself or the client.

Speak the draft clearly at a normal volume and pace, as Google’s guidance on entering text by voice recommends. Keep the delivery date and approval condition in the spoken version so they remain available for comparison during review.

For this example, say: Hi Maya. We’ll send the revised scope on Friday. The proposed budget is four thousand eight hundred pounds, pending your approval.

Use Noats to insert the dictated text into your draft. Noats saves available clipboard contents before inserting dictation and restores them afterward unless you have copied something new. Our explanation of clipboard handling during insertion describes that sequence.

After checking the transcription and manually editing the wording and number formatting, the consultant’s reviewed version reads: Hi Maya. We’ll send the revised scope on Friday. The proposed budget is £4,800, pending your approval.

This is an illustrative result, with the review and edits performed by the consultant. The amount now uses the same format as the source note. The message also preserves the distinction between promising to send a scope and asking for approval of a proposed budget.

Set up Dictation and check the resulting promise

Apple’s built-in Dictation has its own setup and controls. In System Settings › Keyboard › Dictation, enable the feature and select or customize its shortcut. You can also start it through Edit › Start Dictation and stop it with Escape. These are Apple’s controls, separate from the Noats insertion routine above.

On Apple silicon, you can continue typing while dictating with Apple’s feature. The Mac User Guide explains these controls and describes alternative suggestions for ambiguous recognition. It also covers manual correction, which remains part of preparing a message for a client.

Review the complete paragraph against the source, including wording that has not been flagged. A correctly spelled name can still name the wrong client. A readable amount can still differ from the proposal. Check the action owner, delivery date and approval condition as well as spelling and punctuation.

In this example, Friday belongs to the promise to send the revised scope. It does not establish an approval deadline for Maya. The phrase pending your approval keeps the budget conditional. Our guide to preserving commitments when working from meeting notes explains why owners, deadlines and conditions need to travel together.

Run the routine on one follow-up paragraph: select the relevant note, speak the intended message, insert the dictation and review the result. Make wording changes yourself wherever the draft differs from the agreement, then compare the edited passage with its source again.

Before sending, check Maya, Friday, £4,800 and pending your approval against the original record. The draft is ready only when it preserves what was agreed.