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iPhone Voice to Text punctuation not working - iOS 17 Update

Has anybody else noticed that the punctuation when using voice to text is suddenly really terrible? I’m fully disabled with hand disabilities that make corrections not just difficult, but exceedingly painful, and suddenly voice to text is adding periods, where I don’t want periods, commas, where I don’t want commas, doesn’t capitalize the first letter on sentences, and is generally so much worse than it was before I updated.


The update I currently have is 16.1.2. I need it to stop. 16.1.2 broke my home screen, my ability to stream on almost all of my streaming services through HDMI, and my ability to speak and have my iPhone translated into a legible sentence. the home screen is just annoying, but the other two are something that severely impacts the disabled community, and I am so disappointed in Apple.


[Re-Titled by Moderator]

dear Apple, please understand that this is not just an annoying bug, it is a bug that causes me severe pain from having to fix the problem, and strips me of my ability to communicate clearly if I don’t fix the problem. I was so grateful for voice to text before, but not now. please do something.

iPhone 11, iOS 16

Posted on Dec 13, 2022 5:23 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Feb 17, 2023 11:22 AM

Voice dictation is completely broken now. Commas and sentence breaks appear for no particular reason. Apple voice dictation has always been problematic, but now it is virtually unusable. Please, fix it.

75 replies

Apr 21, 2024 4:30 PM in response to Kyzmett

Yes, it gets stuck when in dictation mode so you can no longer manually edit text (highlights text, suggests a misspelled word, cursor doesn’t move. I want to (not wanna) throw my phone across the room. Listening, Apple? About to switch to Android which actually has way better dictation software. Wanna is not a word. Your dictation hardware is useless. FIX IT.

Jun 3, 2024 9:01 PM in response to Kyzmett

Apple iPhone 12 user maybe three months of ****


I’m not going to use any punctuation. It’ll all be added by voice to text Cause **** I give up


I’m a writer and editor it’s driving me crazy to do so but the message is more important than my Inner editor atm


Voice to text for apple is broken Throw it away start over.


I don’t even know why I’m dropping this bomb because you’re not gonna fix it and I’m dropping this phone as soon as I can and there’s OS



As soon as I can afford to get back into a galaxy high-end phone like I had, I’m sold, can’t wait. It might be really soon.

Dec 15, 2022 9:32 AM in response to racheals14

I realize you have to go through these steps, but I already updated my phone yesterday. The update fixed my wallpaper, which is a cosmetic thing, but the real problems that actually need to be fixed are still problems, just like numerous people are already reporting. I found another problem in there that wasn’t fixed along with the others… If you airplay something, and then close out of that stream, your phone continues to airplay and you can’t turn it off until you open another media stream to airplay. The option to move media playing back to the iPhone is grayed out Until you open another media stream.


so I still have to correct all of the mistakes in my text, and there are tons, and HDMI is still unusable. Please make the suggestion that auto correction on punctuation should be an option, because it’s so awful. It just makes everything worse. I left that last sentence break after “awful” in on purpose, because I sure as heck didn’t add it. I’ve corrected the rest of my text for the most part, but I had to correct at least six of those unwanted sentence breaks in these two paragraphs.

Oct 16, 2023 11:42 AM in response to randeeb1004

randeeb1004 wrote:

In addition to everyone's comments, NOW the voice-to-text offers uncommon spellings of people's names and you have to change it to the basic spelling.

My experience has been different than yours.

Apple needs top hire employees with NO ACCENT to create the database and suggestions for spellings.

Tell Apple:


Product Feedback - Apple


I would note that there is no such thing as "no accent". Everyone has an accent. You may mean, if you're in the U.S., the "General American Accent', or in the U.K., "Received Pronunciation" but, they are just as much accents as a Southern drawl, a New England twang or Merseyside English.

Jun 12, 2024 8:51 AM in response to AppleVTTbrkn

AppleVTTbrkn wrote:

I don’t even know why I’m dropping this bomb because you’re not gonna fix it and I’m dropping this phone as soon as I can and there’s OS

You're right. No one participating in this forum is "gonna" fix anything. This is a user-to-user forum. If you want Apple to know your thoughts, use the feedback page:


Product Feedback - Apple

Feb 21, 2023 12:03 PM in response to Kyzmett

Yes!! I’ve also done all of these steps. It would be really nice if y’all would stop bouncing it back to the users and fix this problem. It has made voice to text virtually unusable. And whoever decided to have it not capitalize the first letter of a sentence, but capitalized anytime, you pause to grab a breath has lost their mind. Notice the comma after anytime… Siri inserted that, not me. I just left it so you could see it. Please stop telling us to take a bunch of steps we’ve already taken and fix the freaking problem!

Mar 29, 2023 3:40 PM in response to Kyzmett

Completely agree. I'm a writer, and do a LOT of dictation while exercising, doing yard work, etc. The latest changes add punctuation marks incorrectly. If I pause for a second or two to gather my thoughts, it shoves in punctuation. It's wrong virtually EVERY time! It also transcribes so much worse now. I have noticed that if I wait 3-5 seconds, it corrects itself at times. But OMG my friends and I have actually been posting the horrid transcriptions for people to guess what we were truly saying, and there are some NOBODY can guess right!

iPhone Voice to Text punctuation not working - iOS 17 Update

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