iPhone Voice to text issue on iOS 17

I have a disability where it’s very difficult for me to type and I rely heavily on the dictation feature. All the same issues. It is even worse when using a browser for some reason. It is delaying, cutting out words, replacing words with things that make absolutely no sense. Like others have said I used dictation with no issues at all for years; now it is a source of constant frustration.

Of course, as I create this reply the dictation has been very speedy. It’s still made some very strange word choices. I found if I wait a few seconds it will sometimes correct those choices.

This is a huge problem with texting as I often hit send immediately and then my text is just gibberish.

I am having the same issue and I tried changing it to non-US English and it seems to be slightly better but I am still missing entire sentences or words.

It’s almost like it knows what I’m trying to say but it doesn’t want me to say that so it will leave out certain words that completely changes the meaning of the sentence.

One example from earlier today I said I really hate something and it took the word hate out and changed it to want. It initially said hate.

OK and when dictating that previous sentence it also took the word hate out both times.

So it’s doing the same thing for Canadian English I guess I will switch to Australia or New Zealand.

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.

Glad that worked for you! I couldn’t see past step three. What was the rest of the instruction?

I’ve got Grammarly installed on my phone with keyboard full access and access to the microphone. I think that was slowing it down. I’ve turned it off for now and will keep testing.

SteveJim1978 wrote: "...Hopefully they fix it soon."

Let them know:

iPhone Feedback

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The continual iOS updates are not solving this issue. This is an issue with Siri! I don’t know why Apple doesn’t get that. If I go into Chrome and I use Google microphone it works perfectly. But if I use voice to text Siri it’s the same old problems. Apple please figure this out

the commas, the double spacing, the "hast" as in "my dog hast a collar" has me ready to switch to Samsune. The voice to text is unusable. It takes four times to use the voice to text because you have to go back and correct everything and lately what I've been noticing is I get halfway through correcting whatever it is and the iPad decides it's time to just post it as is so my comment gets posted corrected through a completely distorted voice to text and I have a paragraph of nonsense that doesn't mean anything with a bunch of misspelled nonsense and punctuation that makes no sense and double spaces in comments where I didn't ask for them and comments where I said commas and here we are. It's a disaster. It's 2024. I am speaking clear English. This should not be a problem .

there’s one difference that I’ve noticed is that if you use the dictation functionality on your Mac OS, the result is much better than your phone. so that leaves me to believe whatever framework or whatever technologies that Apple is using to take your speech and convert to text is not functioning the same or something else with their dependencies that have to be fixed. i’m not sure if they’re using their own for some of this or some other companies but like I said on the actual Mac, it’s less error prone.

iOS 17.4 I am on now and it's still getting worse, iOS 12 dictation was almost perfect, just needed a few tweaks and now it don't understand anything. Example just yesterday, I was dictating a message, I said "I'll be done in about 20 minutes" this is what the message said: "Call Peter" I looked at it and was like what the ****! So I erased it and said it again. The new message said "I'll be done in 13 minutes" Where is the "about"? And does anyone think 20 sounds like 13? I didn't think so.

Most of the time it's not this bad, most of the time it just deletes words I've said, but I've had similar experiences over and over again in iOS 16 & 17 just like this, it's like they are getting some random crap, another example is if i dictate a person's name, it will add all the info with it if i have it in my contacts, "name, business, sometimes even email and address" just while I'm dictating, aggravating to say the least!

What Happens One I, j’ai we Hamon

that sentence was supposed to say “this is what happens when I say “this is what happens.

I removed my French keyboard since it looked like French words were getting thrown in and now I don’t have the option for dictation even though I have dictation on in settings. Just since I did this disastrous upgrade yesterday

Yes, when I use voice dictation, it will take the same sentences I’m using and repeat them in small phrases over and over until I have literally three screens full of text. I have to go back and fix.

I have noticed this happens when I unplugged into a USB port in my car, but then it also happened when I was using my phone independent of any kind of other device.

It left me with an undecipherable three large screens to try to correct. Because I was talking and not looking at the screen. It has now occurred multiple times. Wasn’t this an issue previously? Also, today is April 24th, 2024 and it is happening to me now

It doesn’t matter which phone you have it’s iOS because it’s also happening on the 13 Pro Max

Mine was doing it too, so I added the English Australian keyboard and that worked but I didn’t really want to rely on using that keyboard. I decided to delete the English US keyboard and then re-add it and now it works fine with the regular English US keyboard.

I turned in my iPhone 13 Pro and got this iPhone 15 Pro and since then I’m having the exact same issues you’re describing. In messaging I will use dictation, speech to text and it either misses the first half of what I started saying or it cuts off the end of what I was saying I’m not sure what’s going on.