Don’t Want to Type? Just Talk. Tale of Life Will Write It Down.

Some of the best stories we hear from Tale of Life members never actually get typed, because the person chose to speak instead of typing. A parent describes their own parents out loud, the way they’d tell it to a grandchild at the kitchen table. The words just appear on the page.

That’s not a metaphor. It’s a real button, sitting right under every story field on your profile: Speak instead of typing.

Where to find it

Open any chapter of your profile — Early Age, Family, Work Life, whichever one you’re filling in — and click Edit. Underneath each question’s text box, next to “Add Photos,” you’ll see it:

Speak instead of typing — uses your browser’s speech service

Click it, and instead of staring at a blank box waiting for the right words to come, you just talk. Your browser listens and turns your voice into text right there in the field, exactly like dictating a text message. Except this time it’s your parents’ names, your childhood street, or the story of how you met your closest friend.

Why this exists

We hear the same thing from a lot of people who sign up for Tale of Life: they know exactly what they want to say, they just don’t want to type it. Maybe typing long paragraphs isn’t comfortable. Maybe the story comes out easier when it’s spoken than when it’s typed one careful word at a time. Either way, the blank text box shouldn’t be the reason a memory never gets saved.

So the rule for every field on Tale of Life is simple: if you can say it, you don’t have to type it. It’s the same philosophy behind our guide on where to start writing your story — the format shouldn’t be what stops you.

What happens when you speak instead of typing

When you click “Speak instead of typing,” your browser sends your voice to its own built-in speech-recognition service to convert it into text. For most people using Chrome, that’s Google’s speech service doing the listening. We never receive or store the audio itself. Only the text you end up keeping — after you’ve read it over and decided it’s right — becomes part of your story. We never save anything without you seeing it first, and typing still works exactly like it always has if you’d rather write it yourself.

Try it on your next chapter

Next time you sit down to fill in a section of your profile, skip the typing and just talk. Tell it the way you’d tell a friend. Clean up the wording after if you want to — it’s still entirely your story, just with one less reason to put it off.

We measure life success by tears of happiness. #tearsofhappiness #taleoflife