In the current climate of AI-everything, I am constantly baffled by iPhone dictation. It persistently does things that I do not want it to do, such as random capitalisation, mis-recognising common words, inserting random spaces without any apparent logic, and so on.
Part of my frustration is due to the fact that it is usually a great deal better than dictation apps of old, but this just serves to make the howlers stand out even more.
Maybe I should just try to learn to use it better. I wonder what others think.
I have been thinking of posting this very subject for weeks. I have no idea why it does certain things (capitalizing a single Word is the most bizarre thing) but also the double space in the middle of a sentence. I have played around with the different dictation switches, but there is no combination that improves things.
I have heard that PadOS 26 has very good dictation and is faster and more accurate. I am just waiting to test it and hope they can pull it off.
I havenât had these issues, but when friends have complained about dictation, Iâve asked them to demonstrate the problem. Universally, they somehow felt compelled to talk to the phone as if it were hard of hearing and didnât quite understand English. When I taught them to dictate in normal conversational tones and speed, results improved.
That shouldnât be an issue as long as you have British selected. It defaults to using the KB language (so make sure to use British layout rather than say US), but if you long press the microphone you can select dictation language.
I am not sure how much commonality there is between dictation and Siri. For me dictation (which I sparingly use) usually works well enough. But Siri has notably deteriorated for me compared to say 5 years ago.
I used to be able to say âhow did the Aâs do?â and it would show me results from the latest game. Now I need to resort to saying âhow did the Athletics do?â to get the same results. If I try using Aâs instead, these days it never gets it right. In fact, last time I tried (before typing this) it returned â adding gravest insult to injury â the latest Yankees results. Yuck! I used to be able to also get around that by asking âhow did Oakland do?â but for obvious reasons that no longer works (speaking of insult⌠well, letâs just not get into that here).
Thatâs often because you have a contact whose name is that Word. It seems to prefer contact names to more common words.
The thing that irks the hell out of me is that iPhone dictation in the Gmail appâand only the Gmail appâcapitalizes the first word of any utterance. So if you put the insertion point somewhere in a sentence to add a word, itâs capitalized. If you stop dictating in the middle of a sentence for some reason and then start again, the first word is capitalized. Itâs maddening, since I refuse to send poorly written email, but I use dictation heavily.
In the last few versions of iOS, the Voice Control dictation doesnât work nearly as well as it used to, so I use the keyboard-triggered dictation even though Iâd really like to have basic voice editing capabilities.
Thatâs odd. I have yet to see it put in a comma at all.
I have, in fact, become accustomed to saying comma, period, or new line to get it to format properly. When I read your post and realized how different this appears for us, I at first thought that perhaps thereâs a auto-correct grammar setting that you had on and I had off, but searching all over Settings, I can find no such setting even though I know it exists on macOS.
[Edit: and now that I write that, I realize that grammar correction in macOS doesnât show up in Settings either, but rather in the Spelling & Grammar contextual menu. No idea where that would be in iOS.]
Yeah, but no grammar â I had checked that. I have a lot there turned on, yet I donât see spurious commas getting inserted into my dictation like @natpoor.
no, me neither, no problem with commas. But I turned off auto capitalisation, and the result is that the first word of a paragraph is not capitalised â as you can see here.
It would be so nice if it didnât put them in for me unless I paused, but it sounds like you are on the other end of the issue. Bonkers! (Fascinating and annoying at the same time!)
Iâve noticed that dictation actually gets worse if I slow down my speech in an attempt to be âeasierâ for the iPhone to understand. My natural speaking voice seems to do better, especially with punctuation. I do find that it often is useful to say âcommaâ, âexclamation pointâ, etc. to get the punctuation correct.
Even so, I definitely proofread before sending dictated texts. I canât recall specific examples at the moment, but I do recall some of them would have been extremely embarrassing if I had actually sent them.
I have noticed a new peculiarity which seems to have originated with iOS 26.
Sometimes, when I have said ânew paragraphâ and got one, when I continue dictating the new paragraph disappears and the insertion point reverts to the end of the previous paragraph.
iOS is also still hallucinating extra words.
I too have had some hilarious miss-transcriptions. Last September I had a seven hour drive to my holiday destination, where I was keen to arrive in time for the sunset, which can be spectacular. I pulled out the iPhone and started a message to a friend âGod what a slogâ.
The iPhone promptly displayed âcold water slugâ.
Just a final note on this thread, which seems to have run its course. My general impression of iPhone dictation as of iOS 26.0.1 is that it is no better, and possibly worse and before. For example, I did not say âandâ at the end of the previous sentence, I said âthanâ â which it still transcribes as âthenâ even when I use excessively clear enunciation. Despite being British, I do not have a strong accent and dictation is set to English (UK).
As for Glass, I am reminded of the wry checkbox in dear old Eudora, which said something like âWaste processor cycles on stupid animationsâ.
