Siri stops recognizing speech

Just trying to keep this active. Happy to see someone else is having the same problem and I'm not crazy, though sorry for us both.

Dictation and spinning blue circle problem

Mine also occurred after a recent update, so I'm gonna dump this back on Apple.

This happens to me on both my iPhone and my iPad, so it's not a hardware issue

Woodwyn, thanks so very much for your post replying to Mark above. And no, you’re not crazy at all! This new truncated dictation issue is so serious that any dictation beyond a single short sentence on my 5S isn’t really worth attempting any longer. On my iPad Mini 2 Retina, with no noise canceling microphone, the issue has made dictation completely impossible.

I’m back to madly typing everything on my iMac. ****, I’d be dictating THIS post, right now, if iOS dictation hadn’t suddenly become so useless.

I’ve also looked around for other iOS dictation apps that allow more dictation time. No joy. After a couple of hours of research on Google and DEVONAgent Pro and at the iOS App Store, I gave up. Most of the apps are designed to automatically translate tourist phrases from English into another language. That won’t help me.

Dictation was the main "killer app" feature for which I bought, and recently warranty-exchanged, my 5S. The dictation problems mean the 5S sits around a lot. I do use it for the Voice Memos app to record meetings and conversations, but that glitchy app has its own set of problems.

One would hope that with Apple’s new emphasis on quality, introduced at WWDC 2015 last week, truncated dictation in iOS would be one of the first issues they fix. After all, this is a capability formerly used regularly by many of Apple’s most productive and highest-earning customers.

Thanks again. Let’s hope the folks at Apple or in Tim Cook’s office, if they haven’t yet noticed the problem themselves, pay attention.

Just to chime in with everybody else, the same thing has been happening on my new iPhone 6 Plus as well as my mother's iPhone 6. It didn't happen with our old iPhone 5s, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was due to an update that occurred a few months ago around the time we switched. What we have found is that we can only say a few sentences before the cursor either freezes or starts spinning, and the dictation will drop all of our words after that. Very annoying!

Mark thanks for bringing this up and Dog Dad thank you for saving time by searching for another app. At the urging of my family, I finally switched from the Samsung Galaxy 4 Android to the iphone 6plus and thus far am not impressed. I dictate everything from messages, to reminders, to emails, etc. and am totally frustrated with the "dictation and blue spining circle" problem. My android was excellent with dictation I hope Apple fixes this soon!

Does Apple really respond to these issues, or is the invaluable community support all that we're getting?

Dog Dad thank you for saving time by searching for another app.

bevmark, thanks for the kind words acknowledging the many hours I spent searching for an alternative.

I might not get it all done tonight, but my plan is to install the current Public Beta version of iOS 9 on my iPad after testing my current backup to be sure it’s complete. That’s a tricky process because doing a backup using iTunes is never complete—Apple currently leaves out books stored in iBooks, for example, along with many other important files and folders. Even some third party apps like the Downcast podcast app do not by default back up the actual MP3 or M4A files. I learned that the hard way a few months ago when I lost a ton of data when i required an iPhone 5S warranty replacement. So it’s a tedious and time consuming process.

I’ll report here if I find improvements to voice dictation on iOS. I’m also currently testing dictation on El Cap and I can tell you from first-hand experience that the Dictation app on that platform crashes constantly. Across four public beta versions I tested thus far, Apple as yet does not appear to have implemented steps to fix all the crashes. However, the app does offer advanced new features, like an end to the annoying “six second delay” each time a user launched Dictation in Yosemite, which made it impractical for most users, as well as better voice commands to control Mac OS X.

You asked Does Apple really respond to these issues, or is the invaluable community support all that we're getting?

I don’t know for sure. My impression is that Apple employees or consultants do monitor these community discussions. But how responsive the company seems depends on other factors in addition to this community’s feedback.

This iPad, incidentally, needs to be backed up anyhow because it got run over by our SUV—twice. Astonishingly, although the screen is a cracked mess, the device functions normally. Maybe that says something about Apple’s manufacturing quality and durability.