Diction 4.0 is the biggest update since launch. The theme is straightforward: do more with your voice, with fewer rough edges. This release took hundreds of commits and more testing rounds than I want to count. Here is what landed.
Speak to Edit
This is the headline feature. Select any text in any app, tap the mic, and say what you want changed.
You are editing an email. You select "Wednesday works for me" and say "Thursday actually." Diction replaces the selection.
It also handles instructions. Select a paragraph and say "translate to Czech." Or "make this shorter." Or "more formal." Diction figures out whether you are giving a literal replacement or an editing instruction and acts accordingly.
Before this, voice keyboards were append-only. You could dictate new text, but editing meant switching to the regular keyboard. Now you stay in voice the whole time.
Custom Words Improve Transcription Directly
In 3.0, custom words (My Words) only helped during AI Enhancement cleanup. Now they feed directly into the speech model as vocabulary hints.
Your coworker's name is Kaelith. Your product is called Nexaro. You added both to My Words. Now the raw transcription gets them right on the first pass, even with AI Enhancement turned off.
This matters most for anyone dictating technical terms, brand names, or anything the base model has never seen.
Long Recordings That Actually Finish
Previous versions could cut off or lose the end of longer dictations. 4.0 rewrites the recording pipeline to handle long sessions without dropping audio.
If you are dictating meeting notes, a long email, or journal entries, the transcript comes back complete.
Profile
Tell Diction who you are and how you write. "I'm a software engineer. I write in short, direct sentences. I use American English."
AI Enhancement uses your profile to match your style. Instead of generic cleanup, it produces text that sounds like you actually wrote it. The profile persists across all your dictations, so you set it once.
Guided Onboarding
First launch used to throw permission dialogs at you and hope you figured it out. Now there is a step-by-step walkthrough: keyboard installation, permissions, first dictation. You know exactly where you are and what to do next.
Better On-Device Setup
Downloading speech models should not be confusing. The download flow is smoother now, preparation is faster, and the model is ready to use as soon as it finishes. No extra steps.
No More Phantom Orange Dot
Opening the Diction app used to activate the microphone, which lit up the iOS orange dot even though you were not dictating. Fixed. The mic only activates when you actually start a dictation.
Under the Hood
- AI Enhancement accuracy improved across apps
- UI polish across the keyboard, history, tones, and settings
- Stability improvements throughout. 4.0 is a significantly more stable release than 3.0.
Diction is a voice keyboard for iPhone. Tap the mic, speak, text appears wherever your cursor is. On-device, cloud, or self-hosted.
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