iMessage Red Voice Recording Symbol Won’t Leave

Been driving me crazy too. In following these instructions, i went to - Go to settings>general>keyboard>enable dictation. Counter-intuitively enough, enabling dictation brings back the normal microphone icon and ditches the horrible red lines. no idea how apple allowed this. but it's terrible. The above solution did work for me

Ok so I held down the red symbol and the microphone came back. But now whenever I put my phone I. My pocket without closing the screen it starts typing letters itself. I did the update this morning. Everytime a do an update a new problem arises

Happened on my wife’s iPhone. Noticed that her messages connection with me had lost their blue bubbles. Compared her Messages settings with mine and could see that iMessage was not checked. Took multiple hard restarts – tap vol up, tap vol down and hold the sleep button through phone restart to the Apple logo – to get it to take both her AppleID email and the phone number and to set the ‘Start messages from’ as her phone number. Then there was the additional problem that the microphone in the reply field had been replace by the voice message graph and that the mic symbol below the keyboard was missing. I did re-enable dictation in Settings, but the problem was not resolved for our message thread (other threads were not affected) until I had deleted the earlier messages from the period where iMessage had not been enabled. Once these were deleted, the mic symbol below the keyboard reappeared and the double tap restored the mic symbol and functions in the reply field. Phew! And the cause? A communication from Microsoft Family telling her that it had signed her out of iMessage which she had assumed was to do with her office’s use of Office 365. I find this deeply alarming and will investigate. I had received an email message from family.microsoft.com asking me to update my MS Family settings and had treated it like a virus though the email headers seemed credible – but I have nothing to do with MS Family’s Services. I will investigate further and report findings. It’s either incredible insensitivity from MS towards other providers or a startling good scam/attack vector. Yikes!

I just found the answer that might help others. Instead of tapping on

my wife's icon to send her a message, I typed in her phone number - this

brought up the microphone under the keyboard as well as the microphone

in the text box. So I sent her a message using the mic - all worked

well. So then I tried using her icon and it was back to normal! I

closed out of iMessage and went back in and tried it with everyone else -

no more voice recording icon - just the microphone! So try typing a

phone number of a friend and see if that works for you!

what finally worked for me was deleting the English keyboard - going to my message (with the red squiggle) and testing the microphone. I reinstalled the English keyboard and the red squiggle was gone finally!!

Mine went away when I clicked the microphone icon in the bottom right corner TWICE

Instead of tapping on that person's icon to send them a message, try typing in their phone number and see if that restores the microphone. It did for me and I was having the issue with all my contacts. Once I fixed it for that one contact, it restored the mic for all my contacts.

This works. When the record icon is there there is no keyboard. Typing the number brings up a keyboard and you can now press the microphone button. Thanks

As crazy as it sounds this worked for me too. Enabling dictation worked!!

I did not get rid of the red icon but I went to settings, messages and turned off “raise arm to listen”. This seems to have stopped it from turning the recording on. I think the red icon is the replacement t for the microphone beciase I cannot find the microphone anymore.

Try settings -general- keyboard - enable dictation and turn that off

I am sorry – but I don't see the problem I described as being Apple's fault, but rather Microsoft's and perhaps through interference at a basic brand loyalty level rather than a technology clash. Apple's iMessage construct makes it simple to use – no more difficult than sending a txt – but underneath Apple packs meta connectivity engineering that 'just works' – until the plug was pulled when Microsoft's construct requested my wife switch off iMessage in Settings and she lost the skein of iMessage software support. Without the connective underpinnings of iMessage, the messages sent were somewhere between dumb txts and fully fledged iMessages. They were still in part connected to each other but only in part connected to the software additions that make iMessages a quite different experience. That includes tools such as dictation through the mic for translation into text, or hifi quality sound recordings for attachment. The order in which things happened seems to have left the messages with recording engaged, but the means to switch it off disengaged. Resetting the iMessage switch in Settings was part of the solution, but as I discovered, it was also necessary to delete the damaged messages in just this conversation thread that couldn't function as iMessages and hadn't had the option to degrade gracefully to simple, uncompromised SMS messages. My apologies that I haven't been able to dig further to find out why the Microsoft application felt it was necessary for iMessage to contained as a potentially threatening third party solution in this way. I suspect neither Microsoft, nor Apple calculated on the risk of the problems that ensued. Anyway, quite some head scratching at my end before I saw and acted on the likely solution of deleting these "Green Bubble" messages in the thread between us sent while iMessage was disabled.

I found solution(with help)

- Go to settings>general>keyboard>enable dictation.

Hey all!

If you don’t see the microphone icon on the bottom right, go to Settings > General > Keyboard and turn on “Enable Dictation”. In fact just turning on Dictation alone may get rid of the red audio symbol.

I believe it’s just a new feature/function, you can see it referenced in this article:

Send and receive audio messages on iPhone - Apple Support

Hope that helps!

becka1985’s solution worked for me. I too was having the same issue with one contact. I also had the red icon the original poster submitted with a screen capture. Make sure you look below the keyboard