- Draft replies from bullet points: “Reply politely, decline the date, offer Tuesday or Thursday”
- Shorten and clarify: “Make this half as long and put the request in the first sentence”
- Change tone: “More friendly” or “more formal, for a public institution”
- Translate with context: say who the reader is and which terms must stay unchanged
Documents
Ask for a summary with a purpose: “Summarise this contract for a manager: obligations, deadlines, penalties, and anything unusual.” For comparisons, ask what changed between two versions. For long reports, ask for questions a critical reader would ask.
Meetings
Transcription plus a prompt gives minutes in minutes: decisions, tasks with owners and deadlines, open questions. Always tell participants you are recording, and check names and numbers — speech recognition misses them most often.
Confidential material stays local
Contracts, HR files and recordings of internal meetings are often confidential. Use your company’s approved tool — or tools that run in your browser, such as local transcription or asking questions about a PDF, where nothing is uploaded.
You stay the author
Read everything before you send it. An email with a wrong date or an invented promise is still your email. A quick rule: the more people read it, the more carefully you check it.