iPhone Voice to Text punctuation not working - iOS 17 Update

I have turned off Auto-Punctuation, which has mitigated the problem to some extent. However, that's not all that's wrong with the voice to text function. One really irritating thing is the appalling use of English in places - for example translating "could have" and "would have" into the grammatically incorrect and ugly: "could of" and "would of". Even "could've" or "would've" would have been better. Surely Apple would employ someone who knows basic English to help program the feature.

Oh my gosh, I’m experiencing the exact same issue, and it’s driving me absolutely nuts!!! I also have experienced MUCH more typos in the speech to text since the last update. I struggle with texting, but don’t have a disability and, I’m actually often (or ‘off and’ as my text to speech just entered…) talking pretty quickly, still there all this extra commas (or Comos ask my speech to text entered… ) everywhere.

Dear Apple (or There are Apple, as my speech to text entered…) please, please, please look into this issue, this is so incredibly frustrating. I want to throw my phone out the window on a daily basis now.

Having the same issue. I have to send many many messages throughout the day and voice to text just throws in periods sporadically and is completely different than it was a few weeks ago. It’s like it can’t understand me at all anymore. Finally really considering getting rid of Apple. I can’t do my job like this.

I found that just turning off Auto-Punctuation solved the problem of spurious, unwanted commas. I prefer to leave Smart Punctuation on because that's what gives me curly quote marks and turns two hyphens into a dash.

I've posted here and feel everyone's pain. I did receive some good information from someone that posted here previously and it's making things a little bit better. Definitely not completely fixed but a little bit better. You need to turn off auto punctuation. Go to settings, general, then turn off auto punctuation under the dictation area. Hope this helps a little for you

this has been a HUGE hindrance to my life and my job. I didn’t realize how much I relied on voice to text to transcribe my work notes before I did this horrible update.

I’ve regretted doing the update EVERY SINGLE DAY SINCE my husband told me to update my phone. I am appalled this is still an issue.

yes, I have changed the auto punctuation and it is more than that.

My problems are that the voice to text is completely changing around what I say and rearranging the sentence and it never ever records the last words of my sentence. Or it will write it and then delete it. It is like it has a mind of its own.

….but it’s actually embarrassing. I cannot rely on it for my work notes anymore, or for sending a message when I cant see my screen because I’m often outside and it’s too bright where I am to read the screen. I can’t even rely on voice to text in the most ‘rough draft’ form because it’s actually just flat out inaccurate. It adds random words and just makes no sense.

I just wish Apple could restore the old voice to text that was so so good and actually made my life so much easier and better!

I went from being loyal to iphone because I used it for my work…and now I worry I need to find something else.

the county I work for is also likely to change the county phones from iPhone because this is impacting so many people.

I don’t understand why there is so little attention to this issue online. Am I searching the wrong thing?

This is yet another example of apple changing things just for the sake of changing them. Moving the buttons to different places that you’re not familiar with, making the screen much more touch sensitive so you accidentally click things you don’t mean to, trying to move the cursor, and now it’s popping up a select or select all button and highlights words you don’t want to highlight, and now this. It was fine the way it was before. Why the **** did they change it? Too bad Steve Jobs is gone. If he was still around, he would make sure that everything works 100% and is not a step backwards before releasing it to the public. This would not fly!

For whatever it’s worth, they CLEARLY don’t want to hear it and seem to have no plans to fix the issues. They just deleted my list for being “unproductive,” for calling them out on the terrible voice to text problems.

All I did was post a grammatical, articulate description of the issues I’m having. No profanity. No hysteria.

They have our money already. They could care less about supporting users.

It is totally unacceptable in this day and age that we put up with such inferior product

For what we are charged for these devices, it is disgusting

Apple knows of the problem people keep complaining everyone you talk to complains about it but yet they do nothing to correct it

Be a **** shame if we all just shut off our apple products

Voice to text is horrible on my new Iphone 14, all the added unnecessary punctuality.

It keeps spelling Tom as Thom. I will correct the spelling of Brittany and later in the paragraph it spells the name Britney. Very Frustrating!

Kevin G

I agree. I have a theory. I have been contacted over the last couple of years to perform translations, transcriptions and editing to improve AI and voice to text. I am a translator and linguist. However, I didn’t participate because AI was attempting to replace professionals in my field. What they have been trying to do for years is save our translation memories using software and the work we do , and then save it to their programs so that AI can then work as well as we can. In addition, the pay for doing the work is extremely low and well below industry standards, so it is common practice to not support this kind of thing. What a lot of employers do in order to get by is to hire non-native speakers. The kind of mistakes I am seeing in voice to text is absolutely the kind of mistakes non-native English speakers would be making. Not only do I notice typical grammatical mistakes, it seems that the voice to text is unable to recognize common English phrases, expressions and cultural references. I am pretty sure it’s because the people that worked on the voice to text were non-native speakers of English, and that those who were used to train AI didn’t have the proper skill set. That’s my take on it. Now just imagine AI applications that control life altering equipment being fed less than accurate data in much the same way. It’s a problem.

My problem is exactly the same as the original poster. I have an iPad air, fourth generation, and my software updates are up-to-date, and listed as 16.6. It is so frustrating and hard on those of us who are handicapped.

Well I had been facing similar problems with an external text to speech AI that I had downloaded on my device, I didn't know that it was due to the update but looking back it does feel so because it was working all fine when I initially had it

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Apple, why do you strive to make things better all the time for us users, but yet most things are just more and more awkward, I too have dexterity problems and use voice to text all the time and then have to spend all my time reading through and correcting taking out commas questionmarks putting capital letters in where they should be. It is so **** frustrating. Some of us people absolutely need talk to text.

Could I ask what you are doing about this to correct it?

Please don’t tell me to restart my phone and do this or that, This is your problem, not ours. It was great before

I would like a reply from you

I might add I never sign up and reply to such forums, but as somebody earlier said, if we don’t say anything or contribute nothing will be rectified and this does need rectifying.

Apple, please sort this