Dictation

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

Settings path: Home › Dictation

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. In the Android test build, allow microphone access when you first open dictation. Clink tries on-device recognition first. If the selected language is unsupported or its speech pack is missing, Clink tries the phone’s default speech service. That service may send audio to its provider and need an internet connection. After a temporary connection or speech-service error, Clink keeps the words already typed and makes up to two recovery attempts. Wait for listening to resume before continuing; speech during an interruption may not be captured. If dictation still fails, check your connection and the speech service’s language downloads, then tap to try again.

• Privacy

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.