Guides

Talking instead of typing

Speak into the field you are already in. Most of it runs on the phone, and the part that sometimes does not is worth knowing about.

Start dictating

Speak to type. Your words are transcribed on-device and streamed straight into whatever field you're typing in. Adds a mic to the panel button.

  1. Open the tools button on the suggestion bar.
  2. Tap the microphone.
  3. Talk. The words arrive in the field as you go, and you can type around them at any point.

What it needs

HomeDictation

The microphone and speech recognition, both of which iOS asks for the first time you use it. Dictation is one of the Membership tools.

How much of it is offline

Dictation uses on-device SpeechTranscriber when available on iOS 26 with its language resources ready. The compatibility speech recognizer can send audio to Apple’s servers, including while those resources download. Dictation is not always offline.

Typing stays on device. Cloud AI is your choice. ›

Dictation assist

Speech recognition gets the words right and the punctuation wrong. When you stop speaking, the model puts the sentence breaks and capitals back, and drops the "um"s.

Without opening the app

A home screen widget starts a session, and the session itself runs as a Live Activity you can end from the Lock Screen.

Swap the whole app for a single dictation screen, and the keyboard opens on the mic instead of the keys. Nothing is switched off: the keys are one tap away, and every setting you have keeps working.

Download on the App Store