This is the Business English Podcast, episode 526.
Can't understand your dictated emails?
Three suggestions.
Welcome to the Business English Podcast from All Ears English.
Get the English skills you need to achieve your dreams in global business.
For a presentation, a meeting or your office party, this is real business english, with your favorite american hosts, lindsey and aubrey, coming to you from arizona and colorado, usa.
Picture this, You're part of the conversation.
Someone jumps in with a fast comment.
Everyone reacts, but you're left behind still processing the words.
It's not that you don't understand English.
It's that real conversations don't slow down for you.
Slang, speed, tone, it all stacks up fast.
The good news, these are trainable skills if you know your English level and what to do to move up.
Start by taking our free two-minute fluency quiz to find out exactly what your level is now.
Go to allearsenglish.com slash fluency score.
That's allearsenglish.com slash f-l-u-e-n-c-y-s-c-o-r-e.
Hello, Aubrey.
How are you doing today?
How's your workday going?
I'm great, Lindsay.
How are you?
Good, good.
Feeling good.
We've been recording a lot of podcast episodes for today.
So it's been really fun.
I have a question for you here.
Yes.
Do you use Siri on your phone?
I think you have an iPhone, right?
Do you ever use Siri?
I have an iPhone.
I don't use Siri, though.
No, I didn't even really know I could.
I feel like I'm not using it like I should be, right?
I'll see other people do like talk to text or, hey, Siri, and they're asking things.
And I'm always like, I should be doing that.
Yeah, I've been experimenting with the ChatGPT voice mode on my phone a little bit, especially as we're building custom chats in some of our courses, by the way, for our students to reflect and review on what they've learned.
But I've never used Siri.
So I don't know.
That's something new.
Interesting.
Well, we got a really great question that I'm excited to dive into here.
It's going to be an interesting discussion about some of the things our phones might be capable of that we might not have used yet.
Yeah, this question came from Gabriel Alvarez Guerra Reyes from Spotify.
And they said, I love you girls.
I moved to the US a year ago and I listen to you every day on my way to work.
My English is still terrible, but thanks to you, I've gained the courage to face the outside world.
Oh, that's so beautiful.
I love that.
Don't you think?
Yes.
Confidence doesn't have to be perfect.
Get out there.
Yes, that's it.
One question.
I find it really difficult when emails are dictated to me over the phone.
Any advice on how to prepare?
Yeah, so interesting.
So I know that phones are capable of doing this, of reading you your emails.
A couple of times I've done this.
I'll get an email and I'm driving and I'll have my phone just read it to me.
And I totally understand why Gabrielle is having difficulty with that because AI voices...
Siri, it's not natural speech.
Sometimes the pronunciation is off.
It's strange.
So we have a few suggestions of things you could do to maybe make this easier.
But also, of course, anything that builds listening fluency is also going to help as you continue building your listening fluency.
When you can't read lips or see visual cues, this also will help you prepare for this.
Yeah, it's so true.
I mean, I know what you're talking about.
I've seen this being done a few times.
Like the intonation can be all wrong, which can really throw you off, which makes us realize how important clear speech and intonation are right.
Exactly, right.
If it's just all sort of run together, the intonation is not correct.
I need to hear that again.
I missed something.
Right, right.
Or there can be, I don't know, like you said, pronunciation mistake.
So it can be kind of messy.
But eventually this technology is going to get better.
In the meantime, we do have some suggestions.
Now we haven't tried these suggestions ourselves yet.
So take it with a grain of salt, but you could try this, right?
These are ideas to get started.
Okay.
Yes.
So, and definitely hit follow guys.
If you're not yet on the right here, on the business English podcast, we have three new episodes every week.
We want to make sure you don't miss any of them.
Yeah.
So what was our first suggestion for what Gabriel could do?
So first is to try changing the voice, right?
So with Siri and also on Android, you have the option to change what the voice sounds like.
And some voices may be more difficult for you to understand.
So you can try out the other voices that your phone settings offer, different accents, different rhythms of speech.
This might actually help.
Yeah, I think I read somewhere that there's research that says that Women's voices are easier to understand than men's voices.
So that's why women make great podcasters, right?
If we don't say so ourselves.
Yeah, if we don't say so.
But it's really up to you.
Maybe it's really a personal thing too.
What do you understand better?
What resonates?
What's more clear for you?
Try out different voices.
Exactly.
Right.
So you can just Google how to change the settings.
It works a little bit different on iPhone and Android to change Siri settings.
You go to settings, Siri and search and tap Siri voice.
Then you can choose the accent and test them out.
You can listen to a little snippet of each voice in the options and choose one that seems the clearest.
At least try it out.
Yeah, really good.
And you can also do it on Android, as we said, too.
Right, Aubrey?
Yeah.
You'll just adjust the Google Assistant voice through the Google app or in settings.
And you also have various voice options there.
Yeah, and also get a voice that's not annoying.
Some of these voices are really annoying, right?
You might just find one of them annoying.
Yeah, it can happen.
It can happen.
We have weird visceral reactions to voice, I think, as human beings um, and so there you go.
All right, that's the first uh.
Tip number two slow down the speed of the voice, and you can do this right.
This could make a huge difference if these emails are just being dictated to you too quickly.
You can easily slow down on an iphone series speech speed or speed it up if you want, but it might help to slow it down, whether it's on an iphone ipad, apple watch.
You just go in the device's settings under accessibility, and then there's a slider.
You can use a voice command as well to slow it down.
Wow, I love that.
We can also do that on Android, too.
Right.
So tapping on accessibility and then selecting text to speech output.
Right, Aubrey?
That's what we would do?
Exactly.
And they also have a speech rate slider.
So you just drag it left or right, you know, left to slow it down.
And then you can preview.
There's like a play button where you can preview that speed to get it, so that you understand more easily.
Really good.
Okay, and then the third thing we can do, which is what many people are doing these days, is use AI.
And how would we do that, Aubrey?
What would be the approach?
So you have a couple of different options.
Last night I tested on the paid version of ChatGPT that I could take an email and I would need to copy it and paste it into ChatGPT.
And then I could ask it to read it back to me in a simplified form or summarize it.
You have so many options.
So that might really help too.
You know, if it's a long email or if reading it word for word is, you're really struggling with that.
AI could simplify it, summarize it, but you're not always in a situation where you can copy it and put it in an AI engine.
So I was researching and there are other AI platforms. that are meant to help with email management that could do this without having to put it in the AI engine.
Oh, cool.
So maybe plugins, things we can put into our email, that kind of thing, you mean?
Exactly, right?
There are these AI-powered email tools that summarize them or give them to you in more concise terms and then dictate them.
So they're meant to manage email overload, prioritize important messages and summarize long threads.
So we can go through a few of them that were just suggested on Google.
As I prepared for this, this made me want to try these all out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
One thing, one caveat here with copying and pasting your emails, especially work emails.
Just be careful.
Make sure you have permission.
You know if you work for like a law firm or there's sensitive customer data in your emails.
Watch out for that.
You don't want to plug all that into or anyone's emails or anything, because it's all.
We don't know where it's all going.
Right.
But yeah, I mean, use these tools.
Right.
This is interesting.
So what's the first tool that will actually plug into your email?
Yeah.
So the first is Microsoft Copilot.
And this is built into Microsoft 365 and Outlook.
So it's a tool that can summarize lengthy email threads or highlight important action items right away.
If you have 200 emails, you can just ask it like, give me my most like, what should I do right now?
What's my most important action item?
And it can also suggest responses.
And Gemini, I think this is happening in our emails right now, at least in my emails.
It should be happening in yours too, Aubrey, or at all our English email.
This is for Gmail users in Google Workspace.
It condenses your emails, kind of summarizes them.
Sometimes it drafts a potential response.
And just this week, I actually used one of those.
Oh, nice.
I think it also brings up like a reminder, a follow-up reminder, if something hasn't been responded to.
That's good too.
Yeah, that's helpful.
Shortwave is another one I haven't heard of.
Right.
Yeah, this was new to me as well.
So it's an AI-focused email client that can be used for Gmail.
And then it organizes related emails into what they call bundles.
And for all of these at least, what Google said is that these all can have voice functions that can dictate your emails to you.
They all have read aloud capabilities.
And what would be helpful is, especially if you have a hard if it's, you know you're not understanding dictated emails.
They could slow down the speech, they could summarize, they could simplify to make it easier.
Nice.
And then Spark is another one.
And this is about prioritizing messages and using AI to summarize longer emails.
Yeah, it can get really overwhelming, Aubrey, when we get so many emails, right?
Handling the influx of emails is a lot.
Yes, we should be taking advantage of these tools.
So I definitely recommend that everyone out there check them out.
Whether you know this listener who wrote in Gabrielle.
If you're not understanding just that straight Siri.
Dictation of emails.
There are a lot of tools that could make this more doable.
And we could do another episode another day on inbox management, which is not exactly what we're talking about today.
I started using a tool about a year ago called SaneBox, where it uses AI for sure to kind of teach you, teach it which pieces of email are just a newsletter that you really don't want to read.
But maybe you can't unsubscribe to it because you don't want to click the link or something.
And which ones are like that you need to see in your inbox.
And so that's eliminated a lot of clutter in my inbox because it just automatically sends newsletters into into SaneBox.
So it's good.
Oh yeah.
So many tools, right?
It's, I know that there's so much that AI, for example, can do that I'm not taking advantage of.
And I think more and more as we become more familiar, we will.
But yeah, I know that whenever we have questions, it's like, how could AI help me?
Yeah, it's really interesting.
And I think it's going to progress so fast in 2026, Aubrey, it's going to be incredible.
Yeah, I think you're right.
Yeah.
Really interesting.
So good question.
And guys, one of my big takeaways for this episode is send us your question, right?
Send it to support at allersenglish.com.
We want to hear from you.
We want your question so we can build great new episodes in the new year.
Okay.
Absolutely.
Awesome.
Thanks, Lindsay.
Really interesting today.
All right.
Good stuff.
Talk soon, Aubrey.
Have a good one.
You too.
Bye.
Thank you for listening to Business English a podcast, just for you, the high achieving global professional.
Want more from All Ears English?
Don't miss our biggest and best podcast with 8 million monthly downloads.
Just search for the All Ears English podcast and hit follow to get four new episodes per week on fluency, American culture, grammar and so much more.
Tap the link in the show notes.
Remember, we believe in connection, not perfection when it comes to learning English.
Follow the All Ears English podcast now.
