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Voice to Text – You Already Have It On Your Apple Products
Looking for an accurate, fast speech recognition solution to turn your spoken voice into text, with punctuation? Don’t waste your time with free or paid apps from the iOS or macOS app store, if you are an Apple user your ecosystem already has this capability.
Essentially Apple has just sherlocked a whole raft of paid and free voice to text apps by introducing it themselves, for free. As always with Apple it’s not a shabby effort either. If you are not aware of what sherlocked means -> When Apple eliminates or shrinks the market for established third-party software due to a free, built-in feature.
It’s in the Voice Memo’s app. Something you likely tried once in the past and then promptly forgot. This new feature in a plethora of smart updates to iOS 18 for your iPhone, watchOS 11 and macOS Sequoia this is one overlooked and very powerful feature for anyone who writes or dictates to get your thoughts down anywhere anytime with one of your devices. Much focus in the media has been around the Siri and ChatGPT integration with these latest releases which is likely why you haven’t heard much about it.
As you may already know, Voice Memos allows you to dictate audio recordings using your voice. That audio is then syncronised across iCloud to your devices. With macOS 15 Sequoia and iOS 18 your voice memos will also be transcribed. That’s really handy I bet you are thinking? But wait there is more, view the transcript of your VoiceMemo on your iPhone or Mac and you can “Resume” recording allowing you to continue speaking and see the real time voice recognition as it happens. Once you have completed your audio simply copy and paste the text wherever you need it, maybe in an email, into a text message or in my case, into a blog post.
This feature is going to be very useful for journalists, doctors, lawyers, insurance assessors, real estate agents or anyone that needs spoken voice to text for their work. Oh and yes it does automatically add punctuation, so no need to say comma, full stop or period which will be familiar if you have used other voice recognition solutions.
Speech to Text on your Apple Watch
To use speech to text on your Apple watch, just open the Voice Memos app. Start recording and start talking. There is no way to pause and then resume recording on your Apple Watch but don’t worry as once the audio is transferred via iCloud to your iPhone or Mac there is a handy setting in the Voice Memos app which allows you to skip silences:
The Enhance Recording options tries to reduce background noise and echo on your recording.
You can delete the voice memos on your Apple Watch by swiping left and you can also rename the voice memo on your Apple watch by swiping right. This paragraph was written using my Apple Watch, my Airpods were not connected so I was just using the in built microphone on my Apple Watch. But with your Apple Airpods connected it would to be useful if you are recording voice memos in noisy environments by utilising the noise cancellation functionality built into the Airpods.
Speech to Text on your iPhone
Switching to the iPhone, in this example I am using an Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max. Open up your voice memos app and all your syncronised voice memos will be there for you. Here the functionality starts to extend from that on the Apple Watch and emulates what you can also do with Voice Memos on your Mac.
Firstly you can search, by typing or using your voice, to find audio or transcripts that you might be looking for, just use one or two words that you may have spoken to be able to find the audio and transcript. Swiping right on a voice memo will allow you to set it as a favourite, handy if you keep coming back to the audio to add more. Swipe left on a voice memo recording and you can delete the audio, move it to a folder or select more actions.
More actions bring up the usual list of things you can do with a file like copy it ready to post in a text message or email, this relates to the audio. For each voice memo there are three blue dots, tap on that and this is where the magic will happen.
You can now edit the recording, here you can append audio from the end of the audio or use the slider to position the play back line anywhere in the audio and resume recording as shown in the animated image. This will overwrite audio from where the line was placed. Real time voice recognition on your iPhone.
When you tap the quote icon, 
this will show you the transcript ready to copy and paste anywhere. But if you are not done you can tap the Replace button which will continue the audio recording and show you the transcript being created in real time.
Speech to Text on your Mac
Finally on your Mac. Again just open the Voice Memos app and all your syncrionised recordings from your Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad and Macs are there for you. If like me you tend to write long articles this is where getting those voice recorded transcripts into your tool of choice in my exmaple WordPress, you may be using Microsoft Word. Maybe you are a legal professional and use something like Lexus Nexus. Genie Practice Management if you are a medical person, scrivener if you are a journalist or blogger, the list goes on. The Voice Memos app on your Mac has the same functionality as on your iPhone, just look for the quote icon.
Speech to Text on your iPad
Of course this great functionality extends to the iPad also, we see this being used along with the iPhone not just for single speaker voice to text but for interview and meeting recording and transcription. For meetings especially we will expect an interest in better quality, wider range microphones that can be used with iPhone and iPad. We will be writing more on this as we test further.