Can you dictate (New or Insert action) with the new AirPods (2.Gen) instead of using the normal microphone? Any experience available. It doesn’t seem to work with my setup (XS Max + 2Gen AirPods)
It works normally! What’s the problem you face ?
I could get dictate to work, however on the Airpods after about 30-40 sec (or whatever the limit Apple has build into the system) recording stops and my Spotify music starts to play on the earphones.
Continuous dictation works fine if you do not have AirPods connected?
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I had similar problem with @us40489.
iPhone XR
Headset: plantronics Voyager 3200
When I try Drafts dictation with iPhone microphone, it works.
When I try Siri and iOS dictation through keyboard microphone mark with the headset, it also works.
But when I try Drafts dictation with the headset, it doesn’t work.
I tried it with English and Japanese. The situation is the same for both language.
When I talk twice slower than the first trial, somehow it catches some of the content.
For instance, when I talk to Drafts as “I’m trying dictation,” it catches as “I know.”
Something would intervene in between and my voice should have been delivered to it not clearly.
It makes me difficult to use Drafts, it would try to understand what I say though.
Is this some kind of known issue then @greg-pierce because I had also become frustrated trying to dictate when connected to Airpods and had been meaning to ask the question?!
For reference, I am using first generation Air Pods, an iPhone 8+, and I can start a dictation session from the context menu (tap in the text entry area and get the menu with dictate on It) and dictate ad infinitum into Drafts14.5.29, wandering away from my phone as I do so; so not my iPhone mic. picking it up at a distance.
The issues being described certainly are not universal, but so far on this thread, there’s one person using 2nd gen Air Pods, one using a Plantronics headset and one using an undisclosed version of Air Pods where there are issues being encountered. Additionally there’s one other person to myself who isn’t having issues with whatever Air Pod/i-device/Drafts combo they are using.
I strongly suspect that to track down the issue or issues at work here might well require a much bigger sample size and precise details of what is being used. Perhaps even how the dictation is being activated as not everyone always gets the difference between using pure IOS dictation and Drafts’ “enhanced” dictation.
I’m using the 1st Gen Apple Airpods. Like you I had experience it when it’s not been a problem - However I have more often than not seen that it’s not picking up the right words etc and making far more mistakes than I would experience when simple using it directly connected to the phone and not the headphones. This is why I wondered if it was an Airpod experience problem or not?!
Background noise and the positioning of microphones is always going to make a difference in transcription quality.
Perhaps try playback from an audio recording app and compare how your voice sounds. In particular, try this whenever you are getting seemingly poor dictation results. It’s simply a way for you to hear what your phone is receiving.
For what it’s worth, my Air Pods work fine when things are relatively quiet, but lots of background noise, including wind if I’m outdoors, can notably affect how well Siri receives and interprets verbal commands. I don’t tend to dictate except when I’m alone and somewhere quiet.
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A little technical background on the APIs involved which might be useful troubleshooting.
When a custom dictation session is launched, Drafts uses AVFoundation classes to configure an audio sessions for recording. This configuration basically tells the system, “Hey, I’m about to record something. It will be spoken words, and I’m fine with you using a bluetooth microphone if it’s available.” These are taken as suggestions by the system, not orders, and iOS is then supposed to figure out the best available microphone to use.
If the AirPods are connected and active, iOS will typically return them…but there may be conditions where it does not.
Unfortunately, whatever it does decide to activate, the system just tells the app the mic is active, not which mic it is…so I have not found a good way to be able to, say, display the active mic in the UI.
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Thanks for the clarification.