funny: dictation seems to cut off my first few words on the iPhone 16 Pro

By Ricardo BrandĂŁo, 25 July, 2025

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Hello friends, I hope everyone is well. iPhone 16 Pro owners, I'd like to hear your opinions and experiences. Using the stable version of iOS 18.5, I notice that I can't start speaking immediately after starting dictation, or the first words I say, including punctuation, aren't recorded. I still have my old iPhone 11 Pro Max, which is the same version as the iOS, but I don't have this problem here; I can start speaking immediately after hearing the dictation beep. Is this normal? Is there anything I can do to fix it? I look forward to your responses and I'm immensely grateful for your help.

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Comments

By Michael Hansen on Friday, July 25, 2025 - 21:45

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

I have an iPhone 16 Pro Max and have experienced this issue since day 1. I also had the opportunity to review an iPhone 16e, and that device did not exhibit the issue.

By Ricardo BrandĂŁo on Monday, July 28, 2025 - 02:42

Yeah. Reading your comment, I can only think that there is something related to A18 Pro processor generating this problem. It would be cool if other people could test the dictation on the standard iPhone 16, for example, even on line 15
Another thing I noticed, and I'm not sure if it's related to this issue, is that if I'm playing music when I start dictation, for example, the music doesn't stop; in fact, the volume is turned up to maximum, unlike on previous iPhones. This might suggest a change in the hardware that handles speech recognition. I don't know, I'm just rambling...

By macOS_Skyline on Monday, July 28, 2025 - 18:14

I have been experiencing this issue since I got my iPad Pro in May of last year, running at the time iPadOS 17.5.
I then started experiencing this issue on my iPhone 15 Pro Max around the time of iOS 18.5’s release.
I am still experiencing this issue even on the iOS 26 beta.
feedback has been sent, there are more than 10 “similar reports”, it’s clearly an issue that Apple is aware of.
The solution I found is, as simple as it sounds, a restart. It fixes the issue, but in my experience, it only fixes it temporarily. sometimes it fixes it for a day, sometimes a week, but it always eventually comes back.
luckily, I haven’t had it for quite a while, so hopefully it’s been resolved within the last couple weeks…
Hope you find a solution, but if not, you can report feedback to Apple.
even on the latest public version of iOS, open Safari and go to the address bar and type in “AppleFeedback://“ with the quotation marks at the beginning and the end removed obviously.

By Ricardo BrandĂŁo on Monday, July 28, 2025 - 19:06

Since I'm also testing iOS 26, I reported this issue to Apple yesterday. I hope this gets fixed soon, or I'll have to relearn how to use dictation.