I use the draft dictation function on my Apple Watch very often, and I am aware that what I am asking now may not be feasible for a watch. However, it would be greatly appreciated if the audio provided could be transcribed by AI, so the text is more accurate and free from the misinterpretations caused by the dictation function.
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I know David Sparks captures via Whisper Memos and the e-mail address for the result is set to his Drafts maildrop address.
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Dictation in drafts is still proving troublesome for me.
Although the draft actions for Claude and for OpenAI to clean up the transcript have worked well, so that’s progress.
What isn’t working well for me is the actual dictation using Drafts ‘Insert’.
Too often it seems to run out of stamina and just end without warning after a minute or so. This unreliability is frustrating. (I am using an iPhone 13 Pro plus running iOS 18.5)
Are there ways of making it more reliable e.g. Importing an audio file?
Or should I accept that it is broken for me and use Whisper Memos sending to the email import for drafts instead?
If dictation is something you do a lot of, there are likely better (mostly Whisper-based) options available. Drafts uses system dictation, which Apple does improve over time, but doesn’t get as much attention as dedicated platforms – and it does seem to be best suited to shorter sessions, and less than optimized on older devices.
You can just record in Voice Memos or similar, and use transcription features also, but they suffer from the same limitations.
Agreed!
I am familiar with the many mainly Whisper based third party options.
A few are starting to use a Whisper large language model to keep all the dictation on the device — I am not fussy about this but I know many in the US are.
To address the topic: I want to be able to use transcription directly within the note or document I am working on — dictate some, write and edit some, complete flexibility.
Third party apps add the friction of copy and paste and going to and fro between different screens. There are just a few that offer this — Reflect, Evernote, Obsidian via a plugin. But I prefer to use Drafts! I would like Drafts to offer me the option of using my OpenAI account and API key within Drafts, perhaps as a preference option or a Drafts Action.
Or just consider it a mainstream expecting and add it as a feature. Plenty of ways of maintaining data integrity for those who have that priority eg LLM as mentioned above.
I don’t know if any of the existing Whisper apps support Shortcuts. If one did, it would be easy to integrate with Drafts to do insertions.
I’ve looked at Whisper and could possibly incorporate it into Drafts someday, but, for now, I think it’s best left to dedicated apps.
Just keep on looking… and perhaps an experiment or two?