A few weeks ago, I shattered my sacrum, the lowest part of your spine, located in the center of your pelvis. Yes, I was doing a physical activity when the injury occurred, but I also have a chronic disability that makes me more prone to this type of injury. It is a massive, messy break.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever had to lie flat on your back for a long period of time, but even with all occupational therapy tools, it is difficult to write. Which is a problem when you are a full-time writer and a creative writing professor. I have two books forthcoming next year with copyedits due, and I have two book proposals that editors have requested. I have articles. More.
My work is so hard because I can’t sit at my desk. Typing is very difficult. But as of last week, I made a big discovery, and I am grateful.
I found a new, highly accurate dictation software that has made my disabled life more accessible. It is called Wispr Flow (or just Wispr). I’ve wanted to tell everyone all about it.
But then I learned that not everyone likes Wispr. On August 19, 2026, The New York Times published a hit piece about Wispr by Amy X. Wang. I was shocked to see the negative headline: “Everyone’s Using This A.I. Dictation App That I Want to Murder With a Hammer.”
There are many problems with Wang’s piece and its argument, but it is also very, very ableist.
As I’ve written before, these myriad debates over the ethics of technology throw disabled students (and others) under the bus. The Times piece does the same. Is Wispr, a seemingly innocuous dictation software, so special that it deserves an entire article in the paper of record? Is it killing good writing, as Wang asserts? Does it deserve the amount of vitriol it receives in the column? The answers are straightforward: No, No, and No.
Dictation isn't new
Wispr, as dictation software goes, breaks little new ground. Wang notes this herself: “I hate that so many people in the world are lauding this like it’s the greatest invention.” She’s right. It’s not a new “invention.” It’s just the latest iteration of a tool that’s been around for decades—or millennia, depending on how you look at it.
Modern computer dictation software is decades old. Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the first big player in this area, was released 30 years ago. Before Dragon—before software—we had typists in the steno pool, transcribing dictation from the little tapes dropped on their desks by Mad Men.
Wang calls Wispr an “A.I. Dictation App,” while admitting, "I’m actually not sure how A.I. is involved in this.” The answer: It isn’t, at least not in the way most people think about AI. Wispr doesn’t write your words for you; it transcribes, just as other dictation apps have transcribed over the years.
I have been dictating my writing for decades, for a variety of reasons, most related to my neurodiversity or other disability issues. Until I discovered Wispr, I used the built-in dictation feature on my iPhone, or the accessibility feature on macOS, but those tools are dodgy at best. Finding dictation software that is effective has been a godsend. Wang agrees, writing that, unlike the dictation feature on her own iPhone, which she calls “abysmal,” Wispr Flow’s "speed and accuracy are pretty astonishing. You can quite literally whisper to it at the softest possible volume, like I’m doing right now, and the transcript will be almost perfect.”
So what’s the problem? It appears from this description that Wispr is a solid dictation app that’s a step up from the one many of us already use. It is higher quality and does a better job. Sure, it’s overhyped by its marketing team, but who cares?
Yes, dictation is writing
Wang believes that the act of dictation itself makes writing worse, and that this worse-writing problem is an epidemic related to dictation. Regarding Wispr, she writes, “I think it’s making everyone sound a little like an idiot, and now everybody has to read everyone else’s idiot words.”
As a person (me) who must use dictation because of neurodiversity and physical disability, those words were a gut punch.
When I write books, essays, poetry, or whatever genre I’m tackling on a particular day, I use every tool at my disposal in the creative process. I handwrite, type, and dictate. Sometimes, I dictate while walking, sometimes while sitting at my desk—the point is, I do whatever it takes to get the words out of my head and into my dirty first draft.
Neurodiversity Essential Reads
If we want to get scientific about it, each type of writing uses different neural pathways of the brain to access creativity. I am lucky that, usually, I get to use all three.
Wang argues that revision is integral to writing, and that is true. No one should use a dictated first draft as a final draft, just as no one should use any first draft as a final draft, no matter what medium they used to create it. However, Wang wrote her column using dictation, but did not edit. She explains, “I’m looking at the paragraphs above, and I’m really itching to edit them. A lot of these sentences are bad. But the whole point of Wispr Flow is that you don’t edit.”
In all my decades of dictation, no matter what software I used, I never avoided editing. That’s just silly. So it's no surprise, given that she did not edit the column, that the writing is not very good. As she admits, “I’m reading these paragraphs above again now and I think I sound like an idiot?” [sic]
To answer her semi-question, she does indeed at least sound like a poor writer. But she already knows why and has told us why: It's because she didn’t revise her dictated writing. But why not? Her answer would have earned her poor feedback from me back when I was teaching first-year argumentation. Wang composed an admittedly poorly written column using Wispr software, and then blamed the software instead of her process.
But it is not Wispr’s fault if the column is poor; it's the fault of the choices the writer made. She could have dictated her column, revised it as usual, and it would have likely been better. Had she typed her column, she would never have turned it in without revision. She’s a professional writer.
The column's weak argument, though, is overshadowed by my biggest problem with it: It is ableist.
Dictation software has always been an accessibility tool
Like all dictation software that has come before it, Wispr is an incredible accessibility tool. That it was invented by tech bros should not drive people away from it. Many accessibility tools were invented by tech bros. The laptop I’m using right now is one of them.
But it's not only physically disabled people who benefit from dictation software. For writers with dyslexia and other language acquisition disabilities, many of whom I teach, dictation is an essential accessibility tool.
“I wish I could describe elegantly how much I hate [Wispr] with some kind of handy, clever metaphor," Wang writes, "but that kind of creativity comes to me through writing with my hands.” But tell me: How many people cannot write with their hands because of an impairment that prevents it? Many of my autistic and ADHD students struggle with dysgraphia, for example, which affects their ability to hand-write.
Or shall we conjure Stephen Hawking and ask him about how his writing and creativity are linked only to his hands? What about Jean-Dominique Bauby of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly?
Wang prefers her hands, but that preference is a privilege. She writes, “Writing is a rigorous process to understand your own thoughts and then lay those thoughts out in a way that convinces or inspires or moves other people. But speaking is not that process.” Of course it is: People have been talking creatively and in ways that move people since the dawn of humanity, long before we learned to scratch out symbols on rocks. We are storytelling animals. And we are, historically, oral storytellers. These oral traits are part of what it means to be human, and they have nothing to do with writing with pen on paper.
But setting anthropology aside, dictation’s job, like any process one uses to create a dirty first draft, is not to “lay out your thoughts” in a “rigorous” way. It is to get them on the page so that you can revise them into something that does those things.
That’s a gift that dictation software gives to neurodivergent and other disabled people. I always teach my students that dictation is an option when they get stuck, or if they've never felt good at writing. They come back to me the next day eyes bright, as though I've opened the door to a new world. "I wrote a thousand words," one said. "It felt like magic."
With powerful dictation software, many more people have access to words who might not have otherwise. A person who struggles to write on a keyboard or with a pen because of an impairment finds themselves able to write. For that writer, dictation software is nothing short of a miracle.