Support

You press once and talk, and Dictate writes it down on your iPhone. If something is not working, the checks below cover almost everything.

How it works

1. Press the red record control on your iPhone or Apple Watch and talk.
2. Press stop. The recording is saved on the device straight away.
3. It is transcribed on your iPhone: by Parakeet, which detects the language, or by Apple Speech, which uses the language you pick. A recording from the Watch is sent to your iPhone first.
4. With Apple Intelligence turned on, a reading version follows a few seconds later. Switch between Enhanced and Original on the recording.
5. If you set up a webhook under Settings, Advanced, the original transcript is POSTed to your URL, signed, and retried if your endpoint is down.

First things to check

• Nothing records. Microphone access is off. Open iOS Settings, Dictate, and turn Microphone on.
• The words are in the wrong language. Parakeet detects 25 languages. For another language, open Settings, pick Apple Speech, and choose your language; the picker offers only the languages this iPhone has models for, and the first recording downloads that language once.
• There is no Enhanced tab. The reading version needs Apple Intelligence. Turn it on in iOS Settings, Apple Intelligence & Siri. Existing recordings can be enhanced from the recording’s menu.
• A name is spelled wrong. Add it to the dictionary in Settings. The reading version uses your spelling.
• The Watch says “Waiting for iPhone”. The Watch hands every recording to your iPhone. Bring the phone in reach and open Dictate; the recording arrives and is transcribed.
• The webhook does not fire. Check that webhooks are enabled and that the destination is an HTTPS URL. Plain http:// is accepted only for localhost, .local hosts and private network addresses. Your endpoint has to answer with a 2xx status within 10 seconds.
• Your receiver rejects the signature. The signature is an HMAC-SHA256 of the raw request body. Verify it against the raw bytes, before any JSON parsing. The webhook reference has a working example.
• The Apple Watch will not start. Only one device records at a time. The Watch says so in words when the iPhone is already recording, and the other way round.

Contact

Write to support@donado.co. Include your iOS version, the transcription model you selected, and what the recording’s status line said.