I’ve been waiting for Apple’s next move in improving dictation in iOS for some time now.

The speech recognition engine built into the Apple Mac and iOS operating systems work well for dictating text. But you can’t use speech to correct words once they hit the screen on iPhones and iPads.

Mac users have an excellent correction command that would be extremely useful for iOS users: “Replace X with Y”. (I would reword this command slightly to be cognitively easier: “X Replace With
Y”, but I digress.)

Starting with the iPad Pro and the 6s phone, speech was available without a Wi-Fi connection. Now that Apple is able to process speech locally on a device, the next step is adding correction commands so it’s possible to use speech to change the words on the screen.

Here’s my question for Apple: what’s taking so long?