How Ona drafts an email that sounds like you

You can spot a machine-written email in two lines. It opens by hoping this finds you well. It circles back. It touches base, and it looks forward to connecting. Nothing in it is wrong, and everyone who reads it knows you did not write it.

The usual explanation is that the model has bad taste. The real problem is that it had nothing of yours to work from. Asked to write a follow-up with no source material, any model reaches for the average of every follow-up ever written, which is exactly what that email sounds like.

Ona starts somewhere else: the call you just had. Ask Ona drafts from the transcript of that meeting, which means it is rearranging sentences you already said rather than inventing sentences a professional might say. That one difference does most of the work.

What sounding like you actually means

There are two ways to imitate someone's voice. You can train a model on everything they have ever written until it learns their habits, or you can hand it the words they used an hour ago and ask it to tidy them. The first is a bigger promise and a worse idea. The second is what happens here.

It works because spoken language is full of the specifics that make writing sound human. On a call you say "we will run the import on your test site first, but I need the product feed from your side before we can start." Left to itself, a model writes "we will progress the integration and revert with next steps." The first sentence is yours, it is shorter, and it contains a condition that matters. Keeping it is not a style choice, it is an accuracy choice.

Where the words come from

A draft draws on four things, all of which are yours. Meeting Notes produces the first three automatically; the fourth is whatever else you have recorded.

• The transcript, which holds your phrasing, your hedges, and the exact numbers anyone said out loud.
• The summary, which holds the shape of the conversation, so the email covers it in the order it happened.
• The decisions and action items, which give the email its spine: who owes what, by when.
• Your earlier meetings with the same people, which is where the names, the shorthand and the history come from.

That last one is why the fifth draft for a client reads better than the first. By then your memory holds the project's own vocabulary. You call it the migration, they call it the switchover, and the draft has heard both often enough to use theirs.

Continuity shows up in smaller ways too. A draft that knows the account can open with "following our call on the 12th" and mean it, because the call on the 12th is in there. It can note that a date has moved twice rather than stating the new one as if it were the first. It can leave out the explanation you already gave them last month, which is the kind of edit that makes an email feel written by someone who was paying attention.

Asking for a better draft

The quality of a draft tracks the quality of the request more than anything else. A vague ask produces a generic email because you left every decision to the model. Five seconds of specificity changes what comes back.

The clearest case is the difference between two questions. Ask for a summary of the call and you get the agenda read back to you, with no commitments in it. Ask what was committed to and who owns each item, and you get a list with names against it, which is the email you were sitting down to write anyway.

Editing is where the voice lands

A draft gets you most of the way. The rest is three small habits, and they take about a minute between them.

Cut the throat-clearing. The first sentence of almost every draft can go, because it exists to warm up rather than to say anything. Start with what was decided instead, and let the greeting be the greeting.

Restore your verbs. If you say "send", replace "provide". If you say "we will look at it this week", do not let it become "we will assess feasibility". You are not making it more casual, you are making it true to what you actually promised.

Keep your own sign-off. The phrase you end every email with is the single strongest signal that a person wrote it, and it costs nothing to put back.

Here is what that minute looks like on one draft, line by line. The left column is what came back from the call, faithfully and at slightly too much length. The right is what went out.

Nothing in the left column is wrong, and none of it was invented. It is the call, transcribed and tidied, with the hedges you used out loud still attached. That is why the edits are mechanical: cut the warm-up, unwind one hedge, name the thing you need, and end the way you always end.

The first week is the worst week

It is worth saying that this starts weak. On day one you have one recorded call and no history, so a draft can only tidy that one conversation. It will get the commitments right and the context thin, and you will do more editing than you expected.

By the third or fourth call with the same people, the difference is obvious. The drafts stop re-explaining things everyone already agreed, and start referring back to them. Nothing changed in the product that week. You just gave it more of your own words to work with.

The same trick, elsewhere

Nothing here is specific to email. The same source material drafts a handover note for the colleague covering your accounts, a short update in the channel where the project lives, or a client digest that goes out every Friday without you asking. A Routine can prepare that digest on a schedule and leave it waiting for your edit, which is the same five-minute job repeated once a week instead of five times a day. If most of your writing is addressed to clients, the Ona for client-facing professionals page covers where else this lands in the week.

The limits, stated plainly

Ona can copy your phrasing. It cannot copy your judgement. It does not know that this client needs the bad news softened, that the number you quoted was a ceiling rather than a price, or that you have decided not to mention the delay until Thursday. None of that was said on the call, so none of it is in the draft.

Spoken voice is also not written voice. People repeat themselves out loud, trail off, and say "basically" a lot. A draft built from a transcript can come out more conversational than you would write, and occasionally it keeps a sentence you only said because you were thinking. Reading it once catches both.

A draft can also inherit a mishearing. Transcription is good and it is not perfect, and the things it gets wrong are the things that matter in an email: a surname, a figure said quickly, a product name that sounds like an ordinary word. If you are asserting something on someone else's behalf, check it against the line where they said it before it goes out with your name on it.