I have every single issue discussed in this thread since updating from iOS 16 (which I would take back in a heartbeat) to 17.4 (and then 17.4.1). Many other issues too—but once I got through the no cellular service for 2 days til I erased and reinstalled (also a known issue, per Senior Support), the dictation degradation is the most egregious loss of functionality. There are several issues notes in this thread and i have them all. This thread reps a significant swath of users with these issues so it's not isolated. Reddit has a few threads on same stuff as well.
Alas,, the NZ or AU keyboard trick didn't work for me—I still have all the issues and just ended up with spellings like "realise" and "centre" so I went back. (I'd have dealt with the spellings if it had fixed the other stuff.)
iPhone 14 here, but I've read all 5 pages of this thread and it's clearly on all phones.
My feedback to Apple was thus (handily summarizing ALL of our issues as described here):
PLEASE fix dictation in iOS 17. (.4.1) With the microphone active , you can no longer place the cursor where you want, it won’t place and/or it jumps to the end of the body of text (incredibly frustrating if the text is long), (2) it’s randomly missing words at the beginning and/or middle and/or end of the sentence, (3) it’s missing easy ordinary words that USED to capture fine, (4) it wrongly capitalizes any word after a new mid-sentrence insertion point, which it didn’t do before
In iOS 16 dictation was 90-95% accurate which was great, in iOS 17 I’d say 60%. This is a massive degradation. I don’t know what you did to it but please fix. This is an incredibly important feature!
Please also return the ability to scroll up to View previous messages even when you’re typing a text in the text window (Messages).
See how many people have same issues: (And then I shared the link to this thread)
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May they deign to address this sooner than later.