iPhone Dictation Not Working in Confluence? 10 Fixes That Work

Short answer: If iPhone dictation is not working in Confluence, open the page in the editor and tap into the title or body until the keyboard appears, then tap its mic key. A page you are reading has no keyboard. Dictated changes stay unpublished until you tap Publish or Update.

A lot of Confluence work happens in the gaps between meetings. A teammate asks for your input on a page, a notification tells you someone mentioned you, or you want to write up a call before the details fade. You open Confluence on your iPhone, and saying your thoughts is far quicker than thumbing them out. Then there is no mic to tap, or a menu swallows half of what you said, or the section you dictated on the way home turns out to be visible to nobody but you.

Four facts about Confluence on iPhone explain almost all of it. First, Confluence has no dictation of its own. On iPhone the mic lives on the keyboard, the keyboard only appears when a text field has the cursor, and a page you are reading is not a text field, however much text is on it. Second, Confluence's editor formats as you type, so certain characters open menus, mention people or turn a line into a heading or a list. Third, on most pages nothing you write is visible to anyone else until you publish it, and a comment is not posted until you post it. Fourth, Confluence is a work app. It often sits behind your company's sign-in, it may come with policies set by your organization, and the iPhone keyboard was built for sentences, not for the commands and product names that turn up in technical pages.

So most Confluence dictation problems on iPhone are about getting into the editor, getting a cursor in the right place and making sure your words are actually published, not about your microphone. This guide goes through every cause in order, starting with the most common. If dictation is failing in every app on your phone and not only in Confluence, start with our complete guide to iPhone dictation not working instead. The same fixes apply to Confluence on iPad.

How dictation reaches Confluence on iPhone

You can use Confluence on iPhone in two ways: Atlassian's Confluence app, or your Confluence site in Safari or another browser. Neither has a dictation button in the editor. Dictation comes from the keyboard. You put the cursor in a page title, the page body or a comment box, the keyboard slides up, you tap the mic key and speak, and the words arrive at the cursor as if you had typed them. Confluence cannot tell the difference, and it applies all of its usual rules to what you said.

That gives you a simple rule for everything below. If there is no keyboard on screen, there is no mic to tap, and the question is why nothing has the cursor. If the keyboard is up and the mic is missing or does nothing, the question is about the keyboard and the phone. If the words arrive but come out wrong, or never appear for anyone else, the question is about what Confluence did with them. One more thing to keep apart: the row of formatting and insert buttons that sits just above the keyboard while you edit belongs to Confluence. The mic belongs to the keyboard underneath it.

The 30-second Notes test

Before you change anything, open the Notes app, create a new note, tap in the body so that the keyboard appears, then tap the mic key and say a sentence.

• If dictation fails in Notes too, the problem is dictation on your iPhone, not Confluence. Go to fix 10.
• If it works in Notes but there is no keyboard in Confluence, go to fixes 1, 2 and 3.
• If the keyboard appears in Confluence but has no mic, go to fix 4.
• If nobody else can see what you dictated, go to fixes 5 and 6.
• If your words opened a menu, became a name or reformatted a line, go to fix 7.
• If commands or product names came out changed, go to fix 8.
• If your words went into search or the wrong place, go to fix 9.

The 10 fixes, in order

1. Open the editor, then tap into the page

This is the cause behind most "there is no mic in Confluence" reports. When you open a page from a notification, a search result or the page tree, Confluence shows it for reading. You can tap the text as often as you like and no keyboard appears, because in view mode the page is a document, not a field. With no keyboard there is no mic, so there is nothing to dictate with.

To edit, tap the edit button on the page, usually shown as a pencil. The editor opens with a toolbar of formatting options, and once you tap into the text a cursor appears and the keyboard slides up. Some newer kinds of Confluence page can be edited in place without a separate edit step. On those, tapping into the text is enough, and the keyboard appearing tells you that you are editing.

Not everything on a page is editable on a phone. Some elements, such as certain macros and embedded content, appear in the mobile editor as blocks you can see but not type inside. If the keyboard will not appear on one part of a page, tap a normal paragraph above or below it instead, or leave that part for when you are back at a computer.

2. Tap the title or the body, not the toolbar

Even in the editor, the cursor is not always where you think it is. A page has two separate text areas: the title at the top and the body underneath. Around them sit things that look close to text but are not, such as the toolbar above the keyboard, the insert menu, and pickers for links, colours and emoji. If you last tapped one of those, the keyboard may close or stop sending text to the page until you tap back into the text.

The title is a single line. It is meant to be a short name people can find in search and in the page tree. If you create a new page and simply start talking, everything goes into the title, because that is where the cursor starts. And if you say "new line" while you are in the title, Confluence usually moves you down into the body rather than adding a second line, so the rest of your sentence lands on the page, split from its first half. Say a short name into the title, then tap into the body and talk through the content there.

3. Check that you can edit the page, or at least comment

If there is no edit button, or the editor never opens, you may not have permission to change this page. Confluence lets space admins and page owners restrict who can view a page and who can edit it, and some people can only read a whole space. Restrictions can also be inherited from a parent page, so a page that looks open can still be locked because of where it sits in the tree. Without edit rights there is no editor, and no amount of dictation troubleshooting will change that.

Ask the page owner or a space admin for edit access if you need it. If you can comment but not edit, you can still dictate a comment (fix 6), which is often enough to suggest the change you had in mind.

4. Get a keyboard with a mic on screen

If the keyboard appears but there is no mic, check which keyboard is showing. Apple's mic key sits at the bottom of Apple's keyboard. Many third-party keyboards have no mic of their own, so if one of those is active there is nothing to tap. Tap and hold the globe key and switch to Apple's keyboard, or to a third-party keyboard that has a built-in mic. Our guide to the mic button missing from the iPhone keyboard covers the case where Apple's keyboard has no mic either.

Work apps add two more reasons a keyboard can change under you. iOS always switches to Apple's keyboard for password fields, and many companies put Confluence behind a single sign-on page with a password and a one-time code, so a custom keyboard disappears while you sign in and may not come back straight away. Tap into the editor again once you are through. And iOS lets an app, or a policy your organization applies to it, allow only Apple's keyboard. If your own keyboard works in every app except Confluence, and Apple's keyboard always appears there instead, that is probably a work policy rather than a fault, and your IT team can tell you. If a keyboard switches back on its own in other apps too, our guide to an iPhone keyboard that keeps switching back walks through the other causes.

5. Publish the page, and check who else is editing

This fix is for words that arrived but never reached anyone. When you edit a page, Confluence keeps your changes as you go, but on most pages readers only see them once you publish, with the Publish or Update button at the top of the editor. Until then, everyone else sees the previous version, and a brand-new page exists only as your draft.

On a phone it is easy to dictate a section, switch to another app or lock the screen, and assume the page is done. Confluence normally holds on to unpublished changes, so they are rarely lost, but nobody else can see them. If a page you wrote seems to have vanished, look in your drafts or recent work, open it, and publish from there.

Collaborative editing adds a wrinkle. Several people can edit a page at the same time, and changes from everyone in the editor are published together. If a colleague publishes while you are still dictating, your half-finished paragraph can go out with their changes, and if someone deletes the section you are dictating into, your words go with it. On a busy page, publish when your text is in a sensible state rather than in the middle of a sentence.

6. Post your comments before you move on

Comments are a small version of the same problem. Page comments sit at the bottom of the page, and replies sit under the comment they answer. Either way, what you dictate into a comment box is a draft until you tap the button to post it. Scroll away, go back to the page tree or switch apps, and an unposted comment may not survive.

Be careful with selected text. If you are in the editor and some text is highlighted when you tap the mic, dictation replaces the highlighted text, just as typing would. If that happens, undo straight away by swiping left with three fingers or shaking the phone, then tap once where you want new words so nothing is highlighted before you speak.

7. Watch for slash menus, mentions and markdown

Confluence's editor formats as you type, and dictated text counts as typing. A slash can open a menu of things to insert, such as tables, panels and macros, and while that menu is open your next words are treated as a search for an item in it. An at sign opens a picker for mentioning a teammate, and whatever you say next becomes a search for a person. A colon followed directly by letters can open an emoji picker. Some characters at the start of a line are read as markdown: a hash sign and a space can turn the line into a heading, a dash or an asterisk can start a bulleted list, a number followed by a full stop can start a numbered one, and a pair of square brackets can create an action item with a checkbox.

Dictation produces these characters when you say their names, and also from things you might not expect. An email address brings an at sign with it, and dictated numbered points often arrive as a number and a full stop at the start of a line. You have not lost anything when this happens. It is formatting, not deletion. Close the menu or picker, or undo straight away, which usually removes the formatting and keeps your words. For mentions, it is easiest to dictate the sentence first, then type the at sign and pick the person by hand. Our guide to dictating quotes and special characters covers how to say symbols when you do want them.

8. Stop the keyboard changing commands and names

Technical pages are full of things that must be exact: commands, file paths, configuration values, issue keys and product names. The iPhone keyboard was built for sentences, and by default it changes text as you go. Smart Punctuation turns straight quotes into curly ones and a pair of hyphens into a long dash. Auto-capitalization capitalizes the first word after a full stop. Auto-correction swaps unfamiliar words for familiar ones. None of that matters in a paragraph, and all of it can break a command someone copies from your page.

If you write technical pages from your phone, consider turning off Smart Punctuation under Settings → General → Keyboard, where you will also find the switches for auto-capitalization and auto-correction. Then dictate the explanation and type or paste the exact parts. A code block is the right home for commands, and pasting into it is safer than speaking into it. For issue keys and product names, paste them, or check each one after dictation.

9. Find words that landed somewhere else

If you dictated and the text seems to be missing, it usually went somewhere you were not looking. Check these in order:

• The title. A new page starts with the cursor in the title (fix 2).
• Search. If the search field was active, your words became a search, not page content.
• A menu or picker. A slash or an at sign may have sent the rest of your sentence into a search for an item or a person (fix 7).
• A table cell, panel or code block. If the cursor was inside one when you started, everything you said went in there too.
• An unposted comment. A comment box you opened earlier may still be holding your words (fix 6).
• Your drafts. The text is on the page, but the page was never published (fix 5).

10. Free up the microphone, and check dictation on your iPhone

Dictation needs the microphone to itself. If you are still on a call, whether a phone call, a FaceTime call or a meeting in another app, that call can keep hold of the microphone, and dictation may refuse to start until it lets go. This comes up often with Confluence, because the moment you most want to write up a meeting is right after it, sometimes before the meeting app has properly let go. End the call fully, then try again.

Headphones are the next suspect. If the mic key does nothing, or dictation starts and gives up at once, disconnect your Bluetooth earbuds or headset and test with the iPhone's own microphone. If that works, the problem is the headset connection, not Confluence.

If dictation failed in Notes too, the problem is on the phone. Open Settings → General → Keyboard and make sure Enable Dictation is on. If the switch is missing or greyed out, check Screen Time: under Content & Privacy Restrictions, make sure Siri & Dictation is allowed. A work iPhone may also restrict dictation through its management profile. Make sure the keyboard language matches the language you are speaking, install any pending iOS update, and if nothing else has worked, restart your iPhone.

Confluence quirks that look like broken dictation

• Dictation stops halfway through a thought. iPhone dictation stops when you pause, which is exactly what happens while you work out how to phrase a section. Our guide to iPhone dictation that keeps stopping explains what you can do about it.
• Text arrives late or the editor warns you about the connection. The editor keeps your changes in step with everyone else's over the network, and on a weak mobile connection it may pause or warn you. Stop dictating until it recovers, then check that the last thing you said made it onto the page.
• The keyboard closes while you are talking. Scrolling a long page or tapping the toolbar can end editing, which closes the keyboard and stops dictation. Keep your thumb off the screen until your words have arrived.
• A heading swallowed a paragraph. The cursor was on a heading line when you started, and everything you said took on that style. Put the cursor in a normal paragraph, or change the text style back from the toolbar.
• Jira keys and acronyms come out wrong. Issue keys, service names and internal shorthand are the words general dictation handles worst. Paste those. If you update Jira from your phone too, our guide to iPhone dictation not working in Jira covers the same kinds of problems there.

Quick triage

• No keyboard on an open page: you are reading, not editing. Fix 1.
• The title ate the whole paragraph: it is one line only. Fix 2.
• No edit button at all: page or space restrictions. Fix 3.
• Keyboard has no mic, or Apple's keyboard keeps taking over: the wrong keyboard, a sign-in screen or a work policy. Fix 4.
• Your team cannot see your changes: the page was never published. Fix 5.
• A comment disappeared: it was never posted. Fix 6.
• Words vanished into a menu, became a name or turned into a heading: slash, at sign or markdown. Fix 7.
• A command or name came out changed: the keyboard's own corrections. Fix 8.
• Words went missing: check the places in fix 9.
• Fails in Notes too: microphone or iPhone settings. Fix 10.

Confluence on iPhone versus Confluence on a Mac

The editor's rules are the same everywhere. You still need to be editing, the slash, the at sign and markdown still change what you say, and nothing is visible until you publish. What changes is how dictation starts. On a Mac you press a shortcut, and the usual trap is a page left in view mode or a click that left focus on the toolbar. On iPhone everything runs through the keyboard, so the first question is always whether the keyboard appeared and whether it has a mic, and a phone adds its own traps in sign-in screens, work policies and a keyboard that corrects as you go. If you write pages on both, our guide to Mac dictation not working in Confluence covers the desktop side.

A dictation workflow that suits Confluence on a phone

• Edit first, then title. Open the editor, say a short title, then tap into the body.
• Talk each section through. Say it the way you would explain it to a colleague who missed the meeting. It is easier to tidy spoken paragraphs than to fill an empty page with your thumbs.
• Leave structure for later. Insert tables, panels and macros once you have finished talking, so a menu never opens in the middle of a sentence.
• Paste the exact parts. Links, issue keys, figures and commands are faster and safer to paste than to speak.
• Publish, then read the published page. Check it the way your readers will see it, before you lock the phone.

It is worth the effort because speaking is much faster than typing. Most adults type around 40 words per minute on a full keyboard, and even professional typists usually sit around 80 to 100, while normal speech runs at 130 to 150 words per minute. On a phone the gap is wider still. Documentation is where that gap matters most, because the page that feels like too much to type on a phone often never gets written at all. Our guide to dictating Confluence pages by voice walks through the setup, and our guide to dictation for project documentation covers how to structure longer pages.

A keyboard with a mic for every space

Apple's dictation is free and built in, but it stops when you pause, it depends on settings that are easy to switch off by accident, and fixing a misheard word means going back and editing by hand on a small screen.

Voice Keyboard Pro is a custom iPhone keyboard with a built-in mic button for dictation in any iOS app, Confluence included, whether you use the app or the site in Safari. Open the editor, tap into the page, tap the mic, speak, and your words are added at the cursor. Because it is a keyboard rather than a feature of one app, it works the same way in Confluence, Jira, Slack, Mail and everywhere else you type. Like any keyboard, it only appears while Confluence is editing text, so fixes 1, 2 and 5 still apply, and if your organization allows only Apple's keyboard in work apps (fix 4), that rule applies to it too.

A few features help with documentation in particular:

• Voice Edit lets you speak a change to fix text, so you can correct a sentence in a page or a comment without selecting and retyping it.
• Two-way translation while dictating, across 24 languages, lets you speak in one language and write in another, which helps on teams that document in a shared language that is not everyone's first.
• Swipe typing is there for the parts you would rather not say out loud in an open office.

Setup means adding the keyboard in Settings and allowing Full Access so it can reach the transcription service. Our guide to enabling Full Access for an iPhone keyboard explains what that permission does. On privacy, our servers store only operational pings. No audio and no transcript content is stored, which matters when your pages describe internal plans. There is a free tier with daily limits, and Pro is $4.99 a month or $34.99 a year. On a Mac, the same app lives in your menu bar: hold a hotkey, speak, release, and the text appears at your cursor. It adds Smart Vocabulary, a personal dictionary with replacement rules for your team's product names and acronyms, and Meeting Mode with speaker detection and AI notes for the meetings your pages are written about.

Frequently asked questions

Does the Confluence app have voice typing?

Not of its own. Dictation on iPhone comes from the keyboard, so you open the editor, tap into the page so the keyboard appears, and tap its mic key. Any keyboard with a mic works, including Apple's.

Why is there no keyboard when I open a Confluence page?

The page is in view mode, which has no text field. Tap the edit button to open the editor, then tap into the title or body until a cursor appears. Pages opened from notifications and search usually start in view mode.

Why can't my team see what I dictated?

Your changes are still a draft. On most pages, readers only see edits after you tap Publish or Update. If you left the page, find it in your drafts or recent work and publish it from there.

Does the Confluence app need microphone permission for dictation?

No. Keyboard dictation is handled by the keyboard, not by Confluence. Apple's dictation follows the Enable Dictation setting, and a third-party keyboard with a mic needs Full Access, not a permission from Confluence.

Why does Apple's keyboard always appear in Confluence instead of mine?

Either you are on a password or sign-in screen, where iOS always uses Apple's keyboard, or your organization has a policy that allows only Apple's keyboard in work apps. If it happens only in Confluence and other work apps, ask your IT team.

Does this work the same way on iPad?

Yes. Confluence on iPad uses the same editor, publishing and comment rules, and dictation still comes from the keyboard, so every fix here applies.

What to do next

Run the 30-second Notes test, then work through the fixes that match what you saw. For most people it is fix 1: the page was open, but in view mode, so there was no keyboard and no mic. If your words turned into formatting or disappeared into a menu, it is fix 7, and if your team cannot see what you wrote, it is fix 5. If Apple's keyboard keeps taking over, check fix 4 before anything else. And if you want dictation that works the same way in every app on your phone, try Voice Keyboard Pro's free tier on your next page.