Voice Dictation Intermittently Quits in Notes Application on iPhone X

Hello CharPatton,

Thanks for posting! Dictation is a great function, and I'd like to help out with what's happening on your device. It sounds like it frequently stops working after a pause in speaking; is that right?

I tested this out and left Dictation running in Notes for about a minute with no audio input, and it continued running, so there may be a few factors to consider here. I'd like to get a few more details.

First, just to double-check, is it possible you might've accidentally tapped the window at the bottom that continues the waveform view?

Is this happening with any other apps, or does it only happen in Notes?

Have you tried restarting your iPhone since you noticed this behavior? Restart your iPhone

You mentioned internet connectivity. While some languages do support offline dictation, it might be worth testing; does the same thing happen on both Wi-Fi and cellular data? How about on multiple Wi-Fi networks?

Also, updating to iOS 13.4 might be helpful: How to back up your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch and Update your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch

Feel free to reply back here with an update on how it goes.

Have a good one.

This is also an issue for me and feels like it is something that has changed in a recent update. I believe there used to be auditory or haptic feedback when dictation ended. Now, I find myself regularly looking down at my phone to find out that dictation has ended while I have continued to speak. This was definitely not an issue in the past. I was really proud of the fact that I could dictate a 1000 word blog post at a rate three times faster than I type on a regular laptop keyboard. Now, I continually find myself having to recall my stream of consciousness thought from the previous 15 to 30 seconds every time the dictation stops without any notification.

My experience is that once you start dictation, it will automatically time out after 60 seconds whether you were speaking at that moment or not. I understand this may be a limitation of processing power and/or the need to process the information on the Internet. I can live with that. I cannot live with not knowing that dictation has stopped. If you think about it, it's definitely a bug that you would require a user to be actively looking at a screen to know when dictation has stopped. It really defeats the purpose of being able to just walk around and dictate.

I will also add that this is not the only issue with keyboard functionality that has come up in the past year. There's also a feature that allowed you to easily turn a lowercase word into the capital version that has disappeared in the past year. So, it seems like there is something going sideways in the Apple department that is responsible for managing the keyboard experience.

Hi there CharPatton,

Thanks for the reply! Be sure to post back in this thread with what you find after you give those steps a try.

Take care.