Dictating in Siri gets worse and worse and worse. iPhone 11.

[DavidInSydney]

Dictating in Siri was pretty bad at the beginning, at some point improved quite a lot, and then got worse and worse and worse.

Does anyone know why this is the case. I still prefer to dictate, and in fact I’m dictating this post at the moment. It has captured everything perfectly. But then most of the time it’s just plain irritating.

The sheer randomness is irritating, sometimes working very well, other times completely useless. Sometimes there’s a weird mixup with foreign languages, usually French. Sometimes I say something, maybe 10 words, and what comes up? Utan. Yes, one word — Utan. Why Utan, it’s not even an English word.

What is going on?

 

[Elyment]

Exactly my issue @DavidInSydney it’s driving me mad… WTF is “Utan“??! I’ve even gone to the length of changing autocorrect in my settings to remove Utan from future texts but it still doesn’t work LOL. Please someone tell me there’s a fix for this or a upgrade to remove the little Utan bug.

Dictation was getting really good and I use it 90% of the time, but now on top of the Utan thing that replaces strings of verbal text, it gets words wrong all the time and my dictatation is like talking to my 90 YO partially deaf grandma ?

 

[71Danielle]

Just wondering if anyone figured this out please? I have the Utan issue too. My phone will record the entire sentence, then just as I hit send, it changes it to Utan. I have informed my phone that I refuse to tan as its bad for skin cancer, but it just keeps insisting. Utan! Utan! Utan! Ahhhhhhh! Sorry, ignore that little rant, but if anyone knows how to fix this I would be grateful.

 

[DavidInSydney]

These days Siri starts off sentences with Call, or Cause. Utan has disappeared.

Siri is getting worse. A few days ago I said "Remind me to call Marulie about 12pm" and it came up with...

Meryl is our 84 year old neighbour.

 

[71Danielle]

Hilarious! Not even close to what you said! It does seem to be better this week. The last time it put in Utan for me was a conversation I had with my daughter on 22 April. We had descended into trying to make Utan fit into sentences. Maybe they improved it in an update lately because the whole dictation thing seems to be functioning a bit better.

 

[DavidInSydney]

Funny!

One thing I’ve noticed, Siri and dictation is a lot better on my iPhone 11 than on my 3 year old iPad Pro. And very bad on my 2015 iMac.

 

[Elyment]

This was driving me to sheer insanity and after resetting all settings without any improvement I went to the Apple store and they suggested erasing content. Didn’t work and added a new word entered into my dictated translations for some variation- “ooty” is also now in the lineup!

I’m currently on the phone to Support and they suggested resetting network settings which I think has helped a little but *that word* is still showing up. I directed them to this thread and they’re logging the fault as we speak ??

Will keep you updated!

 

[Elyment]

Right, folks: so, after a lot of troubleshooting we may have just landed on the solution but it would be great if you guys could test this, too.

Go into settings ➡️ General ➡️ Dictionary and untick English (UK) Oxford Dictionary of English and English (UK) Oxford Thesaurus of English.

Let me know if that improves the situation and I’ll be chatting to Apple support again later in the week good luck!

 

[LeeW]

Don't think anything is going to improve Siri at this point. It's just not a good product.

 

[Elyment]

Actually, I just upgraded my phone and possibly that, combined with unchecking those two dictionaries and just keeping Apple dictionary checked, Siri is more accurate tonight than she has in the past 6 - 12 months!

 

[George Knighton]

Actually, I just upgraded my phone and possibly that, combined with unchecking those two dictionaries and just keeping Apple dictionary checked, Siri is more accurate tonight than she has in the past 6 - 12 months!

Hmmm. I’ll give that a try.

I’m also getting a lot of “Something went wrong” with 14.5.1

 

[cherrypie]

This was driving me to sheer insanity and after resetting all settings without any improvement I went to the Apple store and they suggested erasing content. Didn’t work and added a new word entered into my dictated translations for some variation- “ooty” is also now in the lineup!

I’m currently on the phone to Support and they suggested resetting network settings which I think has helped a little but *that word* is still showing up. I directed them to this thread and they’re logging the fault as we speak ??

Will keep you updated!

I get 'ooty' all the time! And sometimes the results are so incomprehensible that I cannot work out what I was trying to say. There is *nothing* in the Eng language that sounds like 'ooty' , nothing that makes sense anyway. What I have worked out is that both Utan and Ooty are places in India!

It's now Feb 2024 and Apple still hasn't addressed this problem - which I find consistent with all Mac problems, each OS gets worse and worse.