Voice dictation issue on new iPad

It might also be a firewall issue, check with your it department. I am not sure what ports it uses.

Do FaceTime and iMessage work for you? It sounds like apns might be blocked.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1629

Apple Push Notification Service

I work as a tech in State Primary, Secondary and Specialist Schools in Victoria, Australia where we have many iPads up to iPad3. I estimate that iPads would now number in tens of thousands at Vic state schools. All the schools are mandated to use a single ISP via proxy servers. Many iPad/iPhone apps cannot understand the presence of a proxy and fail to work, the main problem being at those schools which require authentication at the proxy (so we can differentiate between staff and students for access levels). This is a major cause of irritation for the techs and for the users.

One problematic application is Nuance Dragon Dictate - this simply fails to connect no matter what proxy solutions we try. I'm puzzled that text to speech conversion requires an Internet connection - perhaps its more to do with the fact that Apple collect your address book and iTunes content at the same time. Nuance are not interested in helping here; they simply state that their product is not designed to work with proxy servers.

Now in iPad3 there is an interesting development as it appears that Apple have licensed the dictate software from Nuance and Dictation is now a part of the iOS. This doesn't work behind our proxy either but perhaps since it is a part of the iOS, we can make someone at Apple sit up and take notice of our plight since Nuance won't.

Can anyone suggest the best way to bring this to the attention of Apple? I can imagine that a phone call to support will bring the usual repsonse that the fault is with our firewalls and they don't support the use of authenticating proxies. Well I've got several thousand users who would like to see the problems supported and would like Apple to acknowledge that their products are used at schools (and businesses) worldwide with authenticating proxies.

Totally agree here Neil, Apple are sadly dropping the ball on this, they are definately very aware the quantities of iPads in schools around Australia, they held enough seminars to promote the thing to schools, so I'm very sure they know very well how many schools and how many thousands of iPads are being used by schools. Especially Specialist schools where Speech to text and text to speech are extremely important, in teaching.

Hopefully there will be a fix to this issue soon.

I have lodged the issue with Apple telephone support who said they would pass it up the line as a bug. They also suggested I lodge it at www.apple.com/feedback which I have done. I would urge anyone else in the corporate or education world who is stumped by the patchy proxy support in iOS to also lodge fault reports with the support line and on the feedback portal. The more fault reports the more likely it is that something will be done.

Not yet.

I have problem with my iPad voice dictation, it doesn't work anymore after I speak to it!

Do you have solution to fix it! Should I restore iOS 5.1.1 on the iPad?

I have the same problem. But restoring iOS 5.1.1 did not help in my case.

Do you use dictation on your Computer with Mountain Lion aswell?

And where do you live?