iPhone Dictation Not Working in Substack? 10 Fixes That Work

Short answer: If iPhone dictation is not working in Substack, tap inside a note, comment or the body of a draft so the keyboard appears, then use the mic key on the keyboard. The app has no dictation button of its own, and nothing reaches readers until you tap Post or Publish.

The idea for next week's issue arrives while you are out walking the dog. The Substack app is on your iPhone, and saying the first three paragraphs would take a minute. So you open the app and look for a microphone, and there is none. Or you tap the post you were reading and no keyboard appears at all. Or the keyboard appears and your opening paragraph becomes the title. Or the words go in perfectly, and that evening the draft is nowhere to be found on your Mac.

Four facts about Substack on an iPhone explain almost all of it. First, on iPhone the mic that types lives on the keyboard, and the keyboard only appears when a text field has the cursor. Second, the Substack app is mostly a place to read: a feed, an inbox and posts, with only a handful of places that take text. Third, Substack on a phone is more than one thing. There is the app, there is the website in Safari, and one account can write for more than one publication. Fourth, what you dictate stays on your screen until you tap the button that sends it, and a post that has been emailed to subscribers cannot be called back.

So most Substack dictation problems on iPhone are about getting a cursor into the right field, having the right keyboard on screen and tapping the right button afterwards, 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 Substack, start with our complete guide to iPhone dictation not working instead. The same fixes apply on iPad, and the app is updated regularly, so exact button names and positions may differ a little from what you see on your screen.

First, where in Substack are you?

On an iPhone, writing in Substack can happen in several places, and each one handles text a little differently.

• A note. Notes is Substack's short-form feed. Writing a note opens a small composer of its own, with its own Post button.
• A comment or a reply. The box under a post or under a note. It belongs to that one conversation.
• Chat and direct messages. A message to your publication's chat or to one person. Each has its own field and its own send button.
• A post draft. A title, a subtitle and a body. At the time of writing the app can draft and publish posts, though the fuller set of tools is on the website.
• The website in Safari. Signing in at substack.com in Safari gives you the dashboard, the web editor and the settings pages, squeezed onto a small screen.

Then there is the question of which account and which publication. The app and Safari keep separate sign-ins, so it is possible to be one person in the app and another in the browser. One account can also write for more than one publication, and each keeps its own drafts. And a link tapped inside the app can open a web page in a browser view within the app, which looks like Substack but is not the app's own editor. Knowing which of these you are in settles a good share of the confusion below.

How dictation reaches Substack on an iPhone

The Substack app has no dictation button of its own. On an iPhone, dictation comes from the keyboard. Apple's keyboard shows a microphone key when Enable Dictation is switched on in Settings. A voice keyboard, ours included, brings its own mic button. Either way it is the keyboard that listens, and it puts the text wherever the cursor is, exactly as if you had typed it.

Two things follow from that. No keyboard on screen means no mic, however long you search the Substack screen for one. And Substack only ever receives characters. It does not know whether they were typed, swiped or spoken, and it has no setting that turns dictation on or off.

One point causes a lot of wasted searching. Substack has features for audio and video, and those record sound for your readers to listen to. They do not type. If iOS asks whether Substack may use the microphone, the request comes from one of those recording features. So the Microphone switch for Substack in the Settings app is about recording, and changing it does nothing for dictation. Apple dictation does not need that switch, and a third-party keyboard has its own permissions.

That leaves one rule to remember: dictated text goes to whichever field has the cursor, and Substack treats it exactly like typing. A sentence in the body of a draft is a sentence. The same sentence in the title is the subject line of your email.

The 30-second Notes test

Before you change anything, open Apple's Notes app, start a new note, tap the mic on the keyboard and say a sentence. Then go back to Substack, start a new note or open a draft, tap in the text so the cursor blinks, and dictate the same sentence.

• If nothing appears in Apple Notes either, the problem is dictation on your iPhone, not Substack. Go to fixes 2 and 10.
• If Apple Notes works but no keyboard appears in Substack, go to fix 1.
• If the keyboard appears but has no mic, go to fix 2.
• If you tapped a microphone and it started recording instead of typing, go to fix 3.
• If your words appeared in the title or the subtitle, go to fix 4.
• If your words appeared in a search box, a link field or a caption, go to fix 5.
• If your usual keyboard vanished on a sign-in screen, go to fix 6.
• If the on-screen keyboard will not come up at all, or the mic refuses to start, go to fix 7.
• If you cannot find the draft you dictated into, go to fix 8.
• If readers never saw what you said, go to fix 9.

One habit saves a lot of repair work on a phone. If a paragraph lands somewhere it should not, undo it straight away. Shake the phone and tap Undo, or swipe left with three fingers, before you try to fix it by hand.

The 10 fixes, in order

1. Tap into a text field until the keyboard appears

This is the cause behind most "there is no mic in Substack" reports. Most of what you look at in the app cannot be edited. The home feed is a list of notes. The inbox is a list of posts. An open post is a page for reading, even when you are signed in as the person who wrote it. Tapping the text of a post may highlight a word or bring up a share option, but it does not place a cursor, so no keyboard appears and there is no mic to find.

To write, you have to open something that takes text. Tap the button that starts a new note or a new post. Tap the comment field under a post. Open a chat and tap the message field at the bottom. Then check for two things before you speak: the keyboard is on screen, and a cursor is blinking in the field.

Inside a draft, tapping is not always the same as placing a cursor. Tapping an image selects the image. Tapping a button, a divider or an embedded post selects that item. Scrolling does not move the cursor at all, so a paragraph you have scrolled to is not a paragraph you are in. Tap in a line of text in the body, or in the empty line where the next paragraph will go.

A published post works the same way. To change it you open it for editing from your publication's list of posts, not from the page your readers see. A preview of a draft is also for reading only. Close the preview to get back to the editor.

2. Find the mic on the keyboard

If the keyboard is up and there is still no mic, the keyboard is the place to look, not Substack.

• Enable Dictation is off. Open Settings, then General, then Keyboard, and switch on Enable Dictation. While it is off, Apple's keyboard has no mic key in any app.
• A different keyboard is showing. If you have several keyboards installed, the globe key moves between them, and each has its own layout. Touch and hold the globe key and pick the keyboard you meant to use. The emoji keyboard and number pads have no mic of their own.
• A voice keyboard without its permissions. A third-party voice keyboard has to be added under Settings, then General, then Keyboard, then Keyboards, and it usually needs Allow Full Access switched on there before its mic can work.
• The wrong language. Dictation listens in the language of the keyboard that is showing. If the space bar names a language you are not speaking, switch keyboards before you start.

If the mic key is missing in every app, our guide to the iPhone dictation mic button missing goes through each cause in more detail.

3. Know which microphone you are tapping

There can be more than one microphone symbol within reach, and only one of them types.

• The mic on the keyboard. This is the one that turns speech into text at the cursor.
• Recording controls in Substack. A control for recording audio or video, or for going live, captures sound for your audience. Nothing you say there becomes text in your draft.
• Siri. Holding the side button talks to Siri. Siri answers questions and runs commands. It does not type into the Substack field you were looking at.

If you spoke for a minute and ended up with a recording, or with nothing, check which of these you tapped. Then tap in the text field, wait for the keyboard, and use the mic that sits on it.

4. Keep your paragraph out of the title

A new post draft usually opens with the cursor in the title, because that is the first thing Substack expects you to write. Start speaking the moment the editor opens and your opening paragraph becomes a title several lines long. That matters more here than in most apps. The title is what subscribers see as the subject line of the email unless you set a different one, and the subtitle is typically used as the short description shown with the post when it is shared.

Both are fields of their own, not part of the body. If a paragraph ends up in either, touch and hold the text, choose Select All, then Cut. Tap in the body and paste. Then type the title by hand. A title is short and exact, and it is worth the ten seconds.

Moving between fields also ends a dictation session. If you tap from the title to the body while the keyboard is still listening, the last few words can be dropped or can land in the field you just left. Finish one field, stop dictating, tap the next, and start again.

5. Leave search, link and caption fields first

Substack puts small text fields on top of what you are writing, and each of them will take every word you say.

• Search. The search field for finding publications and people is a real text field. A dictated paragraph there becomes a very long search.
• The link field. Adding a link asks for a web address. A sentence dictated there becomes the address, and the link goes nowhere.
• Captions. Tapping under an image can put the cursor in its caption. The caption accepts sentences, so nothing looks wrong until you notice a paragraph sitting under a photograph.
• A restack with a note. Sharing someone else's post with your own comment opens a composer attached to their post. What you say there is published on your profile next to their work, not saved in your draft.
• A reply, not a new comment. Tapping Reply under one reader's comment addresses that reader. Check whose name is on the box before you speak.
• The wrong chat. A chat with all of your subscribers and a direct message to one person look much alike on a small screen. Read the name at the top.

In every one of these cases dictation worked. It filled in the wrong box. Close the extra field, tap back in the body, check for the cursor and speak again.

6. Expect the keyboard to change on sign-in screens

Substack signs you in with a link sent to your email address or with a password, and it can ask you to sign in again when a session has run out. On a password field, iOS replaces any third-party keyboard with Apple's own for security, and that keyboard has no mic key while the password field is active. A field for a numeric code shows a number pad, which has no mic either.

So if your voice keyboard disappeared the moment a sign-in screen came up, nothing is broken. Type the password, or use the sign-in link in your email, and your usual keyboard comes back as soon as you are in an ordinary text field again.

Phones that are managed by an employer or a school can carry rules that limit third-party keyboards or switch dictation off. If the settings in fix 2 are greyed out, that is the likely reason, and the person who manages the phone is the one to ask.

7. Free up the keyboard and the microphone

Sometimes the field is right and the keyboard is right, and one of them is busy elsewhere.

• A hardware keyboard is connected. When a Bluetooth keyboard is paired and switched on, iOS hides the on-screen keyboard, and the mic key goes with it. Switch the hardware keyboard off, or turn Bluetooth off for a moment, and tap the field again.
• A call is in progress. A phone call or a video call holds the microphone, and dictation has to wait until it ends. A call that was put on hold or never properly hung up counts too. Our guide to iPhone dictation not working during a phone call covers this case.
• Substack is recording. If you started a recording or a live video in the app, the microphone belongs to that until you stop it.
• Something is playing. If you are listening to a podcast or a voiceover, the sound will usually pause or drop in volume when dictation starts. That is normal, and it resumes afterwards.
• A different microphone is listening. With earbuds, a headset or a car connected, your iPhone may be listening through that microphone and not the one in your hand. Speak towards the one that is active, or disconnect it.

8. Check the account, the publication and the draft

"My dictation disappeared" is quite often "my dictation is somewhere I am not looking".

Untitled drafts pile up. Substack keeps a draft from the moment you start a new post and enter anything, before it has a proper title. Start a new post a few times in a week and the list of drafts fills with entries that look alike. Open the ones edited most recently before you assume the words are gone.

Publications are separate. If your account writes for more than one publication, your own and a shared one, say, each has its own list of drafts. Check which publication is selected before you start a long piece, and when a draft seems to be missing, switch and look there.

The app and Safari can be different accounts. If you signed in to the app with one email address and to the website with another, each shows its own drafts only. The same is true of your Mac. If a draft from the phone does not show up at your desk, compare the email address on the account in both places.

The same draft open twice. A draft open on your phone and on your Mac at the same moment exists in two copies, and the one that saves last can replace the other. Close it in one place before you dictate in the other.

Short pieces may not be kept. Do not count on an unposted note, comment or chat message surviving if you leave the screen or the app is closed. For anything longer than a line or two, touch and hold the text, choose Select All and Copy before you switch apps.

9. Tap Post, Send or Publish, and read before you do

Words on your screen are not words your readers can see. A note is public when you tap Post. A comment or a reply appears when you post it. A chat message is delivered when you send it. Until then, each is text in a box on your phone.

A post has more steps. Publishing asks who it is for, and it normally sends the post to subscribers by email at the same moment. That email is a copy made when it was sent. If you find a misheard word afterwards and correct it, the page on the web changes and the email in your readers' inboxes does not. So the time to read a dictated post is before you publish it. Read names, numbers and dates with particular care, because those are the words dictation is most likely to get subtly wrong.

Paid posts add one more thing to check. A post for paying subscribers can carry a paywall marker part of the way down. Everything above it is shown to everyone, and everything below it only to people who pay. A section dictated below that line will not reach free readers.

The connection matters too. On a train or in a lift, a tap on Post or Publish may not go through. Stay on the screen until the app confirms, and look at the note or the post afterwards to be sure it is there.

10. Update the app, restart, and check dictation across the phone

If the keyboard and the field are both right and nothing arrives, work outwards from the app to the phone.

• Update Substack. Open the App Store, find Substack and install any update that is waiting. Text-entry bugs do get fixed in app updates.
• Close and reopen the app. Open the app switcher, swipe the Substack card away, then open the app again.
• Restart the iPhone. A restart clears a stuck keyboard and releases the microphone if some other app was holding on to it.
• Check Screen Time. Under Settings, then Screen Time, then Content & Privacy Restrictions, look in the list of allowed apps and features and make sure Siri & Dictation is allowed.
• Check Low Power Mode and the signal. Dictation can stall on a weak connection or when the phone is saving energy. Our guide to iPhone dictation in Low Power Mode covers that pattern.
• Update iOS. Keyboard fixes arrive with system updates, under Settings, then General, then Software Update.

A quick way to separate the app from the phone: sign in at substack.com in Safari, open a draft there and dictate into it. If it works in Safari and not in the app, the app is the problem, and an update or a reinstall is the fix. Posts and drafts that have been saved to your account are kept by Substack, not only on the phone, so reinstalling the app does not remove them. Check that anything you wrote in the last few minutes has been saved first.

Substack quirks that look like broken dictation

• The keyboard is covering the line. On a small screen the keyboard can hide the paragraph you are dictating into. The words are there. Scroll up to see them.
• An at sign opened a list of names. An at sign starts a mention, and a small list of people and publications can appear above the keyboard. Carry on speaking, or tap elsewhere to dismiss it.
• A pasted link became a card. Paste a web address on a line of its own and Substack may turn it into an embedded preview. That is display, not extra text in your post.
• Your words replaced a paragraph. Dictation replaces selected text, just as typing does. If a word or a paragraph was highlighted when you spoke, what you said took its place. Undo straight away, then tap once so that nothing is highlighted.
• A name was changed after you said it. Autocorrect can change a correctly dictated name into a more common word a moment later. Tap the word, and iOS will usually offer what was there before.
• Several paragraphs arrived as one block. Spoken text comes as one run unless you break it up. Say "new paragraph" where your keyboard supports it, or add the breaks by hand before you publish.
• The email looks different from the app. Mail apps apply their own fonts, widths and dark mode. That is styling, not dictation.

Quick triage

• No mic anywhere on the Substack screen: there is no keyboard up, because nothing with a cursor is open. Fix 1.
• Keyboard up, no mic key: Enable Dictation is off, or a different keyboard is showing. Fix 2.
• You got a recording, not text: that was a Substack recording control, not the keyboard mic. Fix 3.
• Your paragraph is the title: the title had the cursor. Fix 4.
• Your words are in search, a link or a caption: that field had the cursor. Fix 5.
• Your voice keyboard vanished at sign-in: a password field is active. Fix 6.
• No on-screen keyboard at all: a hardware keyboard is connected. Fix 7.
• The mic will not start: a call or a recording is holding the microphone. Fix 7.
• The draft is missing on your Mac: another untitled draft, the other publication or a different account. Fix 8.
• A note or comment vanished: it was never posted. Fixes 8 and 9.
• Free readers did not see a section: it is below the paywall line. Fix 9.
• The email has the old wording: it was sent before you corrected the post. Fix 9.
• Works in Safari, not in the app: update or reinstall the app. Fix 10.
• Fails in Apple Notes too: iPhone dictation settings. Fixes 2 and 10.

Substack on iPhone versus on a Mac

Plenty of writers catch ideas on the phone and finish the issue at a desk, and dictation behaves differently in each place. On iPhone the first question is always whether the keyboard appeared, because the mic is part of it. On a Mac there is no keyboard on screen to look for. A shortcut or a hotkey types wherever the cursor is, and the traps are the title field, pop-up boxes and characters that turn into formatting. If that is where you are stuck, our guide to Mac dictation not working in Substack covers the web editor step by step.

The same principle carries over to other publishing apps, with different details. If you also run a blog, our guide to iPhone dictation not working in WordPress covers an editor where a post is a stack of blocks and only some of them take text.

A dictation workflow that suits a phone

1. Start a draft and type a working title. It moves the cursor's starting point out of the way, and it gives the draft a name you can find again later.
2. Tap in the body and check for the cursor. No cursor, no keyboard, no mic.
3. Dictate one section at a time. Speak in full sentences, the way you would explain the idea to a friend, and glance at the screen at the end of each section.
4. Leave the structure for later. Headings, links, buttons, images and the paywall line are easier with a bigger screen and a pointer.
5. Read names, numbers and dates. Fix them while you still remember what you meant.
6. Publish from wherever you can read the whole post. For a note or a comment that is the phone. For a full issue it is often the desk.

An honest limit: a short reply to a reader is often quicker to type or swipe than to dictate, especially somewhere noisy, or somewhere quiet where you would rather not speak. Voice earns its place on the long parts.

And the long parts are worth getting right, 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, where the keyboard is a few centimetres of glass, that gap is the reason a first draft by voice makes sense. Our guide on how to dictate in Substack covers the day-to-day workflow on both iPhone and Mac once everything is working.

A keyboard with the mic built in

Apple dictation is free and built in, but it can stop listening when you pause to think, it depends on settings that are easy to switch off by accident, and fixing a misheard word means dragging a cursor around a small screen.

Voice Keyboard Pro for iPhone is a custom keyboard with a built-in mic button for dictation in any iOS app, the Substack app included. Tap in a note, a comment, a chat or the body of a draft, tap the mic and speak. The text appears at the cursor. Because the mic is part of the keyboard, it is in the same place in every app you write in. Like any keyboard, it needs a field with a cursor, and Substack still decides what the text means, so fixes 1 to 9 still apply.

A few features help with writing on a phone in particular:

• Voice Edit lets you speak a change to fix text, so a misheard word in a paragraph can be corrected by saying what you want instead of placing a cursor with your thumb.
• Two-way translation while dictating covers 24 languages, which is useful when you reply to readers who write to you in another language.
• Swipe typing is built in, so in a quiet carriage or a waiting room you can keep writing without changing keyboards.

On privacy, our servers store only operational pings. No audio and no transcript content is stored, which matters when the draft is a paid post that has not been released yet. 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 product is a menu bar app: hold a hotkey, speak, release, and the text appears at your cursor system-wide, in the Substack editor in your browser and everywhere else.

Frequently asked questions

Does the Substack app have voice typing on iPhone?

No. The Substack app has no dictation button of its own. On an iPhone you dictate with the mic on the keyboard, either Apple's or a voice keyboard's, and the text goes to whichever field has the cursor.

Where is the microphone in the Substack app?

On the keyboard, not in the app. Tap in a note, a comment or the body of a draft so the keyboard appears, and the mic key appears with it. If there is no keyboard on screen, there is no mic.

Why does dictation work in Apple Notes but not in Substack?

Almost always because nothing with a cursor is open. A post you are reading is not a field. Start a note, tap a comment box or open a draft and tap in the body until the cursor blinks, then use the mic on the keyboard.

Why did my paragraph end up in the title?

A new draft usually opens with the cursor in the title. Cut the paragraph, tap in the body and paste it there, then type the title by hand, because the title is also the subject line of the email.

Does Substack need microphone permission for dictation?

No. The keyboard does the listening, so Substack's own Microphone switch in Settings has no effect on dictation. Substack asks for the microphone only for its recording features.

Why did my voice keyboard disappear on the sign-in screen?

iOS switches to Apple's keyboard on password fields, and that keyboard has no mic there. Sign in, and your usual keyboard returns in the next ordinary text field.

Can I fix a dictation mistake after the email has gone out?

On the web, yes: edit the post and confirm the update. In the email, no. The email is a copy made when it was sent, so read a dictated post from top to bottom before you publish.

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 or fix 2: nothing with a cursor was open, so there was no keyboard and no mic, or the keyboard on screen was not the one with dictation switched on. If your opening paragraph keeps arriving in the title, it is fix 4. Whatever the cause, read the post before it goes out, because an email cannot be corrected once it is sent. And if you want a mic that sits in the same place in every app on your iPhone, try Voice Keyboard Pro's free tier on your next note.