For years, voice dictation's fatal flaw was that it struggled to accurately understand what you were saying. While AI has nearly eradicated that issue with products such as Wispr Flow and Google Rambler, a new problem has taken its place.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Google debuted its Pixel 11 lineup, and one of the standout AI features was the new Rambler voice dictation, which integrated into Google Keyboard (Gboard) and offered the same capabilities that Wispr Flow has been able to do for years: precisely understanding users' voice dictation, eliminating filler words, and following a user's train of thought.

As someone who cannot work without Wispr Flow, I tested out Rambler for all my communication, both personal and work, as soon as I got my review units. I soon ran into a hang-up I had never noticed before: tone.

To my boyfriend's credit, he was the first to bring it up, saying he preferred Wispr Flow because it adapted better to his expressions, such as automatically including exclamation points. In what would become foreshadowing, I told him to give Rambler some grace, since it, like Wispr Flow, claims to get to know you better over time and eventually implement that in its dictation.

However, despite my consistent use, Rambler has yet to adapt to my excited and bubbly tone, opting instead to send the driest texts. The catalyst for this review was when I was Slack messaging TDV editor Jason Hiner and had to clarify that I had used Rambler because the message I sent sounded absolutely nothing like me. It was much less friendly, more serious, and more to-the-point than I naturally speak or write in Slack messages.

While it's still polite, the absence of tone indicators, such as punctuation, that you typically use can make people who know you think something is wrong.

For instance, my boyfriend sent a text via voice dictation using Rambler that was fine on its face, but the punctuation made it read as dry and dismissive. After a long day, I misread it that way and brought it up, sparking an issue that never would've happened without the dictation software's punctuation choices. There's actually research to back this reaction:

• A 2016 Binghamton University study found that texts ending with a period were rated less sincere than those that did not.
• A 2025 follow-up study found that when periods were placed after every word, for instance, typing "What. Do. You. Need." instead of "what do you need," the perceived "mean" rating, or how mean of a tone the reader perceived in the texts, was higher, highlighting how readers interpret punctuation in a sentence as an intentional, meaningful act.
• A 2018 The Atlantic article explored the phenomenon of people using so many exclamation points while texting and featured Gretchen McCulloch, a linguist who studies online communication, who said: The single exclamation mark is being used not as an intensity marker, but as a sincerity marker. If I end an email with ‘Thanks!,’ I’m not shouting or being particularly enthusiastic; I’m just trying to convey that I’m sincerely thankful, and I’m saying it with a bit of a social smile.

Our Deeper View

In theory, AI voice dictation features are huge game changers for productivity. If you say it out loud, it will transcribe it for you, saving you the time it takes to type, since most people can speak at least 2-3x faster than they can type. But transcribing what you say is only half the battle, as the consequences of not having that so-called social smile can be serious. For that reason, Wispr Flow remains the undisputed leader until Google fixes this in Rambler. However, this discussion does raise the question of how AI will transform text communication in the future, and how our perceptions of tone in text will evolve as a result. Oh, and to prove my point: I used Wispr Flow to write this entire article, and it understood my intent and intonation perfectly.