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Why Is My iPhone Suddenly Ending My Sentences With A Period?!
It’s making me sound furious. All the time.
What the heck is going on with the iPhone these days?
For years, I’ve used voice dictation to compose most text on my phone. Now, I don’t use it to write journalism or formal prose. But emails, messaging, comments on social media, “notes to self”? Dictate away! That sort of writing has an oral cadence, so talking it out works incredibly well for me.
Over the last decade, I’d estimate that over two-thirds of the text I’ve authored on my phone is dictated. Accuracy-wise, Apple’s voice-transcription AI has been generally quite good — for my voice, anyway. It’s gotten well over 90% of what I say.
Voice dictation requires a different cognitive style: As I blogged last fall, it’s oddly akin to typing on a manual typewriter, because you have to plot out the sentence in your head before you start dictating. But here, I trained myself pretty well. I’ve become pretty good at mentally scripting the punctuation of a sentence and speaking it out — including commas, open-parens and close-parens, quotes and m-dashes and more.
It all worked very well …
… until the last few weeks, when something changed.
