iOS 18 / macOS 15 Beta Warning for Dictation Users

1

If you do a lot of dictation in Drafts using the Drafts custom dictation interface - DO NOT INSTALL THE iOS OR macOS BETAS at this time.

Apple has introduced a bug in their speech recognition frameworks that renders it impossible to do long-form dictation when running on iOS 18 or macOS 15. This will appear in Drafts as data being discarded as you dictate and only the most recent utterance being retained.

At this time, I do not believe there is a workaround for this issue. I have reported it to Apple, and am opening a technical support ticket to attempt to discuss directly with engineering ā€“ perhaps there is something Iā€™m missing, but it seems very broken and the recognition process will discard data as you dictation resulting in data loss, so it is not suitable for use.

For anyone inside Apple who might see this, take a look at FB14699348, and the related issue from last year FB13078071 - for which I did have a workaround, but was never resolved.

I will post updates here as I have them.

3 Likes
2

Slight follow-up on this: I have had a report from inside Apple that they have recognized this regression and prioritized a fix internally. It is still present in iOS 18 / macOS beta 7, however, and it seems likely the bug may at least remain in shipping release versions of these OSes just based on release schedules. Hopefully, they will resolve soon, however.

1 Like
3

Thanks for the update. Been following your posts on this on Mastodon. It does make me think twice about how early to update to 18 :pensive: