iPhone voice dictation: how to turn it on, and what it skips

How to turn Dictation on

1. Open Settings.
2. Go to General, then go to Keyboard.
3. Turn on Dictation.
4. If iOS asks you to confirm, accept.
5. Pick the language you will speak. You can keep more than one and switch from the keyboard.

The path is Settings › General › Keyboard › Dictation. If you do not see Dictation, update iOS or search for “Dictation” in Settings.

The microphone on the keyboard

With dictation on, Apple’s keyboard shows a microphone. You tap it, speak, and the text lands in the field you were already in: WhatsApp, mail, notes, search. Nothing to copy and paste.

If you use more than one language, the globe key switches the language of the transcript. If you dictate in Spanish with the keyboard set to English, the result suffers: that is not a mystery bug, it is the language you asked for.

What it does not do

It transcribes. If you said “um, so, I will not make it tomorrow”, that is what gets written, filler included. There is no dictionary you can teach your boss’s last name or your product’s name. There are no shortcuts that expand a phrase into a block.

That does not make it useless. For a two line WhatsApp note it is enough. For the email you were going to write carefully, you will spend the next minute fixing it with your thumb. That is why a market of keyboards and dictation apps exists on top of the system.

Third party keyboards

iOS lets you install keyboards from other companies. Some of them ship AI dictation. Quality, price, and what they do with audio change by the month, and a ranked list goes stale on its own. The useful rule is the same as on the Mac: does audio leave the phone? Does it clean or transcribe? Can you teach it names?

Apple requires Full Access for a third party keyboard to dictate like the system one. Read that prompt before you allow it. It is not a small print item: it is your keyboard, and everything you type goes through it.

Parlate on iPhone

Parlate is on the App Store for iPhone. From parlate.app the button opens the listing. On Mac and Linux the same dictation installs from this page. Parlate for Windows is on the way. Android follows.

In the meantime, the same dictation already runs on Mac and Linux: hold a shortcut, speak, text appears at the cursor. Parlate for Windows is on the way. Android follows iPhone.

If you also have a Mac

macOS dictation turns on in a similar way, and it has the same ceiling: it transcribes, it does not clean up. How to enable it and what it misses is in the Mac voice dictation guide. If Spanish is the language you actually dictate in, the Spanish voice dictation guide spends more time on the gap.