iPhone Dictation Bug - “Caps on”

Hello, 

I have a concern about iOS dictation commands. I worked with Apple Support, and they reproduced the behavior, but were unable to help.

The error occurs when using the following dictation commands:

Caps on

Caps off

All caps on

All caps off

No space

These commands are often *transcribed* by the iOS instead of being carried out. The following are actual dictation results I received when dictating into Notepad using a new iPhone SE running iOS 13.3.

This is caps on a test caps off to see how dictation works

This is a test all caps on to see how dictation works

Thisis no space atest

(I said: “this no space is no space a no space test”)

For these examples, I was speaking clearly in a quiet environment.

The Apple Support Person at the Apple Store in Tacoma, WA was able to reproduce these results on his personal iPhone, so it seems the problem is not with my specific phone.

This issue has actually existed for several years (at least since 2016, but probably since the dictation feature was released, as early as 2012), under several previous operating systems. I am surprised that I could not find very many people reporting the same problem, but it may be that most people do not try to use dictation commands (as the Apple Support person admitted), or blame themselves for the error, thinking it was somehow a pronunciation error (as I did).

Is this just a known bug that has never been fixed? Doesn’t anyone else try to use dictation commands?

Thanks very much!

PS. Here are a few other threads (going back to 2012!) I found that seem to reference this problem:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8084175

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3839934

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4029382