Dictate in any app · Notes
Highlights without your own words are somebody else's thinking stored in your account. Typally puts your words into Readwise the moment you release the key, in whichever field you left the cursor.
We make Typally, so treat this as a vendor's guide. Where Readwise has a built-in option we say so, including when it is the better choice.AI features that summarise and generate questions from highlights.
Highlighting is effortless and nearly worthless on its own. The note explaining why a passage mattered is what makes it retrievable and useful later, and it is the step everyone skips.
In practice people use it for: Notes on highlights, book summaries, connections between sources, and reading reflections.
Setup happens once, outside Readwise, and then applies to every program on the machine:
Install, sign in, and it waits in the tray.
Text goes wherever Readwise has focus. One click first saves undoing a paragraph in the wrong box.
Push to talk, say your piece, release to transcribe.
The note field is attached to each highlight individually. Open the highlight before speaking.
Typally types into Readwise's note fields, so adding your own thinking to a highlight costs a few seconds rather than being the step that always gets deferred. That note is the difference between a quote archive and a thinking tool.
A reader adds a spoken line to each highlight explaining its relevance to a current project. Six months on, the review surfaces genuinely useful material instead of decontextualised quotes.
Add one spoken sentence to every highlight saying why you kept it. A highlight with no note is a quote you will never find a use for.
The note field is attached to each highlight individually. Open the highlight before speaking.
No. Its AI works on your highlights; notes are typed.
Because the highlight records what an author said. The note records why it mattered to you, which is the retrievable part.
Yes, and summarising in your own words is where the retention actually happens.
You can try this on the free plan — 100 minutes a month, no card, no trial countdown.
Also dictate in: Zotero · Obsidian · Mendeley · see all apps