Strange iPhone dictation issue: Text gets fast-deleted while dictating

I’ve been Googling but can’t find anyone reporting this issue that I’m trying to help solve long-distance for a friend, so I thought I’d toss it out here and see if anybody has any ideas about what’s happening.

My friend has recently discovered the dictation microphone button on the keyboard and now prefers to dictate her Mail messages rather than typing them. But she reports that, very frequently (she says about half the time), she’ll be about 10 lines into dictating the message when, suddenly, the text “starts erasing itself a hundred miles an hour.”

I understand the “hundred miles an hour” part. When I press and hold the delete button for more than a second or two, it starts deleting whole words, quickly, instead of just individual characters. I’m pretty sure that’s what she’s describing.

But I can’t figure out how she’s triggering that behavior while dictating. I don’t know of any dictation commands that delete text that she might inadvertently be saying or sounding like she’s saying. And I’ve tried to dictate some text myself to see if it’s possible to make that happen by touching buttons or shaking the phone or accidentally touching the screen, but so far I haven’t discovered anything helpful.

Anybody ever encounter this before? Any troubleshooting ideas are welcome. I’ve run out. Thanks.

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This has happened to me many times before, but the fast-deletion has always been followed by all the text being “re-typed” into the text box with some kind of corrections done to it.

What does she do after it starts deleting quickly – does she terminate the dictation by X-ing out of it or does she wait a few seconds and nothing happens?

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She says she does terminate immediately. She hasn’t put it into practice yet, but she seems pretty sure that this is the problem. Thanks!

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