iPhone voice dictation making me look like an idiot!

The best advice i can give is to not just listen to the dictation, but to move your focus away from the typing field and then back again. best to always double check or even tripple check.

Here is some advice:
<ol><li>Perhaps the easiest solution is to find another method for entering text. Remember that there are a variety of options other than dictation available to you:
<ul><li>standard typing, touch typing or direct touch typing</li>
<li>using Braille Screen Input</li>
<li>using the VoiceOver Handwriting mode</li>
<li>using an external keyboard or braille display.</li></ul></li>
<li>Whatever method you use to enter text, it may be useful to check that the text appears in the way you want it to. This might involve literally checking every letter. The need to do this minimises if you use another typing method where you have more control over what is entered.</li>
<li>If you continue to use dictation, there are some tips that I've heard work well. I can't speak from experience as I don't use dictation.
<ul><li>Speak in a quiet environment or one in which your voice is easily distinguishable from other sounds.</li>
<li>Know what you want to say before you begin dictating. This will make your speech sound more deliberate, which will make it easier for the voice recognition system to interpret.</li>
<li>Do not leave long spaces between words. Voice recognition uses the context and placement of words—including any pauses between them—to interpret what you are saying. When there are pauses between words, some voice recognition systems struggle to interpret them because there is no surrounding words to use to predict the text. It's a bit like how people read sentences more quickly than individual words because they can use what they have already read to subconciously think about what the text will say.</li>
<li>Apparently, speaking relatively slowly, maintaining a consistent speed, and potentially even speaking with a slight slur can aid voice recognition.</ul></li></ol>

And posted about it here
https://www.applevis.com/forum/ios-ios-app-discussion/voice-over-and-dictation-just-can-t-keep
One of the commenters on that thread suspected that Apple was using the cloud to correct what it thought were dictation errors, and he found it helpful, but it doesn’t work right for me.

It was you.

This is why I always use Braille screen input.

My sighted wife tells me that, quite often when she is using dictation, she will get through an entire phrase and it looks okay. Suddenly the system will make a change of one word in the middle of the phrase as if the system changed its mind in retrospect before finalizing its response.

I guess the answer is that you always have to check the dictation results before sending off a message.

As you point out, I am a bit surprised that the dictation results aren't more sensitive to the context of what has been spoken. I can understand getting individual words wrong, but the context certainly ought to help a "smart" system.

Actually, it is incredible how far speech recognition has come along over the past bunch of years. No training is needed any more, you can dictate in less than optimal conditions, and the results are mostly correct. We've certainly come a long way but there is still obviously a ways to go.

--Pete

Even when I am speaking in a deliberate manner, and speaking in what I believe is a proper voice flow for dictation to interpret what I'm saying, it invariably has a word or two wrong, and in the worst location! So that it has to be scrapped, or just go back to entering it in by hand with touch typing which, by now, I'm very quick at anyway, but not the point.
Please Apple for heaven's sake work on this simple tool for us! Thanks! :(

You post to facebook, only to have, you post to facebook only to have it show up and read like this. Annoying? yep. ;)

When my hands are free, i use Braille screen input. It is relatively good.

I haven't had much experience with dictation on my Mac or iPhone. What I have done with it has been so-so. I just haven't had the time to practice with it, but it's not bad at all. In addition, I've used Siri on my iPhone to make calls and the results were always just as I expected once I added the people to my Contacts. But prior to doing that it came out with some interesting stuff! This resulted in many unintended calls to my parents. But they were very understanding and cool about it, just as I thought they'd be.

Would be nice if dictation could be used to correct mistakes like with Dragon on a Pc.

--Pete

Could be many things. Happened to me yesterday. I said: maybe she'll let me feed her some of her treats.
what it said after I sent it via messenger: maybe she'll let me feed her liver treats
in reference to a stray cat that's become our pet of sorts.

Could be many things. Bad internet connection, not talking clearly enough, or not saying what we thought we said, etc. I had it happen to me at least once or twice that I recall last night.

Mine have been mostly good. I have used it from the 4S and now I have a X. I would say that the accuracy is about 95 percent. My wife is not so lucky.

I am agree. wen I send message from siri, and dictation, it spelled it rong. hello every one! it is the saim problem. we should tell apple about it.

I've just noticed this after updating to the latest version of iOS. Nine times out of ten, dictation totally screws up what I was trying to say. Rather than put up with screwed up facebook posts, tweets, text messages, etc, I've just stopped using dictation altogether. Dictation may be a time savor, but its not worth the few extra seconds you will get by dictating something if you have to go back and fix it.

My neighbor asked me to check her doorway for packages when she was out of town. One day, she had two envelopes sitting there. I picked them up and, because my hands were full, told my phone "tell [neighbor] I have two envelopes for you." Siri came back with "your message to [neighbor] says "I have two on the lips for you." Ready to send it?" Needless to say, I made damn sure to set down what I was carrying and make corrections right away!

Another time, I was talking with a married friend of mine and it changed "I'm in Atlanta; we should get together" to "I love you. We should get together." Sadly, I didn't catch that one in time. Dictation is some dangerous stuff.

This dictation now is so completely unreliable that I had tried installing GBoard from Google, but I cannot get that to play so well with Voiceover.
I really count on dictation for text messages to be productive, it seemed so reliable in the past, but I just do not understand how this is now so completely horrible, especially, I hate to say, when compared to other mobile platforms. Don't get me wrong, I will never switch away from Apple, but how can the competing platform do so well on dictation, and why can't Apple get it right after 8 years?

I think there's a forum for miscellaneous topic discussion if I'm not mistaken. I'm too lazy to look right now. :) That might be a fun thing to do.

I too have been having this issue with dictation. I used to use this all the time before iOS 12, and had gotten pretty good with speaking clearly that it understood me most of the time. On occasion, I would have to correct a few mistakes, but for the most part, it understood me clearly and wrote what I said.

Since iOS 12 though, dictation I find is a hit or miss, heavily leaning on the miss side. Like others have pointed out, I will dictate something, VoiceOver will return with exactly what I said, but if I do as others suggested, leave the field and return, the sentence that dictation inserted is riddled with mistakes. Although when I dictated, it repeated everything I said, word for word, when I go back to the field to double check, I find that VoiceOver lied to me and wrote whatever it wanted.

This was never the case before iOS 12. So I would just suggest that people contact Apple and let them know, so they can look into it and fix it.

Even talking to Siri since iOS12 seems to be more of a pain that it used to be. I sometimes ask how a certain team did in a football game and either get dead silence in response or a message back saying "sorry, I can't help you with that." I know, of course, that Siri can in theory do such requests because I used to do it all the time. The same thing is true when trying to get Siri to start a certain song or playlist. Yeah, she's not my favorite wanna be person on the planet right now.

I have noticed this behavior as well and you just have to double check. But, what's really interesting is that I have noticed that using Siri to send a text message for example instead of going into the messages App tends to give better dictated results. It's like the engine ngine driving dictation for Siri is better than using the dictate button inside the messages App.

Hi all. Back here again I am to pose a question. Has anyone tried dictating stuff with VoiceOver turned off? Reason I ask is that a now former tutor of mine does this all the time with great results. Granted he's not a VoiceOver user, but I'm just wondering if perhaps we might get better results if doing this? I'm gonna try it out myself next week, because my neighbor across the hall is going on vacation for Thanksgiving and I'll have a lot more time.

It used to work so much better in the past. what in the world did they break? the only time it was this bad in the past was when my mics broke on my phone.