Dictation button outside the keyboard

Question

Is there a way to perform dictation on click of a button outside the iOS keyboard. For ex: I have a UITextField with microphone button right. On the click of this button, it should open the same dialog/view as when microphone button is clicked inside the keyboard.

Answer 1

I have been doing a research on this for a while now and could not find a solution for this yet.

You cannot trigger the microphone button outside the keyboard as in the native iPhone search bar in the home screen. This is a private API which is not available for development.

The best possible alternative is to use the Speech framework provided by Apple available in iOS 10.0+ and build your own custom UI to convert speech to text.

Hope this information helps! :)