A Writer Faces Off with Voice-to-Text

[Editor’s note: Gabrielle Drolet’s 'Look Ma, No Hands,' out now from McClelland & Stewart, is a remarkably funny and refreshingly honest memoir of love, grief and friendship amidst disability. With the daring cheekiness that the book’s title suggests, the writer and artist navigates life, work and an absurdly complicated health-care system after developing a mysterious chronic pain in her hands and arms — and ultimately works to rediscover her voice. In this excerpt, the author squares off with voice-to-text software, a potentially invaluable resource which she hasn’t quite gotten the hang of yet.]

I’m writing this with voice-to-text. It isn’t going well.

I’m sitting at the desk in my Montreal apartment, my laptop propped up in front of me with a microphone beside it. As I write, I say everything you’d usually type on a keyboard out loud: I say the words period, comma, semicolon; I say the word italicize; I say new paragraph and delete sentence. I also say profanities whenever the software misunderstands me, which is often.

“I’ve been typing this way for about two years,” I say.

I’ve been typing this way for about tears, the computer writes.

“About two years,” I repeat, raising my voice and enunciating each word clearly.

A button here, it types.

“Fuck,” I mutter.

****, the computer types, refusing to stoop to my level.

I laugh at this — a sound the computer tries to process but can’t — and I give up, using my mouse to go back and fix the mistake manually. The short act of clicking, deleting and retyping sends pain shooting down my forearms and fingers.

My computer and I play this game every day, to varying degrees of frustration: I try to write something and it finds increasingly absurd ways to mishear me. I’ve become used to ignoring the typos altogether on the first draft, which makes this whole process easier. I let the computer write up whatever it thinks I’m saying and come back when it’s time to edit, decoding the mistakes like an archaeologist translating hieroglyphs. What was I trying to say here? I wonder as I parse through my own work. What, exactly, could this mean?

For the most part, I get by with voice-to-text just fine. Most days I even like writing this way. I like leaning back in my chair and speaking into the mic, orating an article or an essay like I’m telling someone a story (albeit one with out-loud punctuation). I like watching the words appear on screen as I speak them, too. But I didn’t feel like this in the beginning.

I’m far from the only writer who uses dictation software, though it’s hard to know how many of us do. Author John Powers writes this way by choice, explaining that it makes his work sound more “natural.” Dan Brown apparently writes his early drafts using dictation software, too, which is fun to imagine: The Da Vinci Code being spoken out loud in some home office before appearing on all of our parents’ bookshelves.

Dictation — the act of speaking words out loud to have them written down — has existed for centuries, established long before computers or voice-to-text software. Agatha Christie spoke her novels into a Dictaphone (an old-timey recording device), getting a typist to write them out afterwards, while Winston Churchill dictated his speeches to a secretary. Other writers turned to dictation specifically as a way to work while disabled. In the 1600s, John Milton dictated many of his poems, including Paradise Lost to his daughter after going completely blind. In the late 1800s, novelist Henry James hired a secretary to transcribe for him when, well into his career, rheumatism in his hands suddenly made writing too painful and difficult.

James apparently experienced the same issues I was grappling with centuries later: he found his writing style changed when he spoke his stories out loud, saying he was too “diffuse” when he dictated. He hated it. However, he eventually became so used to writing by speaking that it became second nature, and he refused to write any other way.

I’ve thought a lot about why shifting to voice-to-text was so difficult for me beyond the technical issues. When dictation has been around for hundreds of years and is present in mainstream publishing today, it’s strange that it felt like a life-altering hurdle.

The simple truth is that I didn’t want to accept I was disabled — that my issue was chronic, and I would need to alter how I lived in a long-term, maybe-even-permanent way. For most of my life, I’d been fed a narrow view of what disability meant and what it looked like. I didn’t realize it was a category I might someday fall into.

I still wasn’t ready to accept how my pain might affect who I was and how I wrote. I resisted giving in completely to voice-to-text, promising myself it was a temporary fix until my hands got better. I spent almost a full year like this, in denial. I pushed myself to type with my hands whenever my symptoms were remotely better, which ultimately made them worse.

Things didn’t shift until my understanding of disability did. I came to understand that the way I navigated the world would have to change, and that included how I wrote.

Voice-to-text has become a big part of both my professional and my personal life, and I’ve learned to appreciate the nuance and humour in this. After all, there’s something deeply funny about shouting at a computer alone in my office or saying the words colon, closed parenthesis when I want to send a smiley face in a text.

My written voice is different than it once was. I can identify the ways in which my writing is more conversational and long-winded, more reflective of the way I speak. I can hear my vocal cadences in some of my work. And though I know my writing will probably never be the same as it was, I’m learning to accept that. Colon, closed parenthesis :)

Excerpted from ‘Look Ma, No Hands’ by Gabrielle Drolet. Copyright © 2025 Gabrielle Drolet. Published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.