One thing Apple really needs to get right is speech to text transcription. They've nailed accessibility in so many ways and yet it feels like they're a decade behind on properly transcribing voices. At least half a decade.

Input on the iPhone is so dreadful nowadays. Their palm rejection is definitely worse than before, so mistyping is more frequent. Their text-correction algorithm for typing is worse than before, and it frequently makes incorrect corrections to words that I don't notice, because they change words a few words back from where I typed. And STT hasn't improved. On top of that, my fingers are tired of the phone form factor. Please make the iphone not a chore to use, apple.

Until siri can reliably handle "Navigate to <business that is a decade old>", offline and using pre-downloaded maps, I'm going to assume all the other, harder speech to text and conversational stuff is just vaporware.

I found another dreadful iPhone input "feature" yesterday. If you are browsing around in third party carplay apps, and ready to tap your selection, but instead press the accelerator first, it truncates the list to only a few items, and scrolls to the top.

Way to reduce driving distractions guys! What's next? If the car is moving, maps changes destinations?

I really wish human computer interaction research were more broadly applied, and if you do dumb stuff like all of the automotive / carplay world, then you'd be liable in court.

I once had a car that hid the backup cam behind a legal disclaimer every time you turned it on. I'm sure at least one pedestrian was hit by a car in reverse while that screen was on. The manufacturer should be 100% liable for the poor UI decision.

Wispr Flow is a masterclass in STT. Apple's solution feels like it's from the last century in comparison. Same applies with Apple's TTS when you have ElevenLabs and OpenAI running laps around it. All I need is for my iPhone to do those things natively at the same quality level (because in Apple's walled garden that's the only way to get them usable everywhere).

All day every day my iPhone makes me feel like an idiot. I need to correct every other word I type (or at least what my iPhone thinks I typed). While correcting, autocorrect introduces new and even more baffling misspellings.

Sometimes it gets to “fever dream where you’re suddenly unable to successfully perform everyday tasks” levels of insanity.

And the worst part is: it used to be fine. I’d type more or less on full keyboard levels of speed and accuracy on my iPhone 4S.

I want to echo the comments that you just made.

One of my primary methods of interacting with an iPhone is through speech and the state of Apple speech transcription is pretty horrible. It bothers me greatly.

I know some of the workarounds and things but it does feel like it’s in the Stone ages.

I don’t think it’s a microphone issue since iPhone microphones are fairly decent and I don’t think it’s a CPU issue either because Apple Silicon seems to be some of the best on the market. Which leaves us with the software…

Maybe they should put that cash hoard to good use and buy up some of these transcription companies or license their IP so we get truly high-quality transcription.

I don't think things have improved much on that front since Colin Hughes gave a run down on Voice Control's problems several years ago

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2023/08/16/those-who-rel...

Would be great if they could at least fix two major bugs:

* input simply fails (seemingly) randomly where it is supported and many apps from major vendors don't support dictation input at all (e.g. OneNote) (there should at least be a fallback (a la Dragon Dictate from decades ago) for those cases * capitalization is still random leaving you with many errors to correct

but Apple mostly seems to see accessibility as something to use to enable performative press releases not actual functionality...

It’d be amazing if speech-to-text could take into account context as well: Greek if I’m speaking Greek, Korean if I’m speaking Korean, or for (int i = 0; i < count; ++i) if I’m dictating code.

Apple dictation on MacOS is actually pretty dang good. I've got it bound to a double-tap on fn and I use it pretty regularly.

speaking of touch though they musn't have touched the swipe-typing feature in a while because somehow it works even better than the keyboard for me most of the time! No nonsense words like "oul" instead of "oil" constantly.

I use Aqua Voice because Apple STT is so frustrating.

I turned off my iphone’s autocorrect because it made too many stealth errors. Now I notice all my mistypes.

I have a friend named Zi in my contacts. For some reason ios kept autocorrecting “I” to “Zi” and would do it too far back for me to notice.

What’s weird is how this is such a dumb bug that Apple usually irons out.

There’s so much complaining about their keyboard issues, and it’s really an infuriating part of the iOS experience. The phone being hard to grip/slippery doesn't help, no…