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Short answer: Installing the app is not enough. Go to Settings, General, Keyboard, Keyboards, Add New Keyboard, and pick Voice Keyboard Pro. Then tap and hold the globe key on any keyboard to switch to it. If the mic does not respond, turn on Allow Full Access for that keyboard.

You downloaded the app, you see its icon on your Home Screen, and yet when you tap into a text field the voice keyboard is nowhere to be found. This is one of the most common points of confusion with third-party keyboards on iPhone, and the good news is that it is almost always a two-minute settings fix rather than a bug. This guide walks through every reason a voice keyboard fails to show up, in the order you should check them, from the most common cause to the rare edge cases.

The core thing to understand up front: on iOS, installing a keyboard app and enabling its keyboard are two separate steps. Apple designed it this way on purpose, so a newly installed keyboard is never active until you explicitly add it and switch to it. Skipping that step is the number one reason people think the keyboard is broken when it is simply waiting to be turned on.

Fix 1: Add the keyboard in Settings (the number one cause)

This is the fix for roughly nine out of ten cases. When you install a keyboard from the App Store, iOS does not automatically make it available. You have to add it yourself.

  1. Open the Settings app.
  2. Tap General.
  3. Tap Keyboard.
  4. Tap Keyboards (the top row, which shows how many you have).
  5. Tap Add New Keyboard.
  6. Under "Third-Party Keyboards," tap Voice Keyboard Pro.

Now the keyboard exists in your rotation. The moment you finish this step, it becomes selectable everywhere you type. If you have set up an iPhone keyboard before, the flow will feel familiar; if not, our walkthrough on setting up a voice typing keyboard on iOS covers the same ground with a little more context.

Fix 2: Switch to it with the globe key

Adding a keyboard does not automatically display it. iPhone keeps whatever keyboard you last used, so you have to switch. There are two ways to do it, both starting from any text field where the keyboard is open:

If you do not see a globe icon at all, it usually means Voice Keyboard Pro is your only third-party keyboard and the emoji keyboard is disabled, so there is nothing to switch between. Adding the keyboard in Fix 1 makes the globe key appear. Once it is there, the mic button lives right on the Voice Keyboard Pro layout, so switching to the keyboard is the same as reaching the mic.

Fix 3: Enable Full Access so the mic works

Sometimes the keyboard shows up fine, but the mic button does nothing, looks greyed out, or the app tells you it needs permission. That is the Full Access setting. A voice keyboard has to send audio for transcription, and iOS gates that capability behind a permission called Allow Full Access, which is off by default for every third-party keyboard.

  1. Open Settings, then General, then Keyboard, then Keyboards.
  2. Tap Voice Keyboard Pro in the list.
  3. Toggle Allow Full Access on, and confirm when iOS asks.

iOS shows a warning when you enable Full Access because, in general, it lets a keyboard communicate over the network. That is exactly what a cloud-based voice keyboard needs in order to turn your speech into text. It is worth knowing what that trust actually buys and what the app does with it: Voice Keyboard Pro's servers store only operational pings, not your audio and not the text you dictate. Nothing you say is uploaded as a saved transcript. If you want the full picture of this permission before flipping it on, our guide to enabling Full Access for a keyboard on iPhone explains what it does and does not allow.

Fix 4: Force-quit and reopen the app you are typing in

iOS caches the keyboard configuration per app. If you added the keyboard while an app like Messages or Notes was already open in the background, that app may still be running with the old keyboard list. The fix is quick:

  1. Swipe up from the bottom of the screen and pause in the middle to open the app switcher.
  2. Swipe the app you were typing in up and off the top to close it fully.
  3. Reopen the app and tap into a text field.

Now the app reloads the current keyboard list and your voice keyboard is available via the globe key. This one catches a lot of people who did everything right in Settings but were testing in an app that never refreshed.

Fix 5: The secure-field exception (this is by design)

Here is a case that looks like a bug but is not. iOS deliberately blocks all third-party keyboards in secure fields, most notably password fields and some payment and card-entry fields. When you tap into one of those, iOS silently swaps back to the built-in keyboard and hides the globe key, so your voice keyboard seems to vanish.

This is a security feature and it applies to every third-party keyboard on the platform, not just this one. There is no setting to override it, and you would not want one. If your voice keyboard is missing specifically when you tap a password box or a credit card number field, that is expected behavior. It will reappear the moment you tap into a normal text field again.

Fix 6: Some apps restrict or replace the keyboard

A small number of apps ship their own custom input view or restrict third-party keyboards for their own reasons. Banking apps and certain enterprise apps are the usual examples. In those apps, no third-party keyboard will appear, again by the app's design rather than a fault on your end.

The quick way to tell whether this is your situation: open a plain app like Notes or Messages and check whether the voice keyboard shows up there. If it works in Notes but not in one specific app, that app is the limiting factor, and the fix is out of your hands. If it does not work in Notes either, the problem is one of the earlier fixes in this list. For a sense of where dictation generally does work, our overview of dictating on iPhone in any app is a useful reference.

Fix 7: Restart the iPhone, then reinstall if needed

If you have done everything above and the keyboard still will not appear, a plain restart clears any stuck state in the keyboard system. Power the phone all the way off, wait a few seconds, and turn it back on. Then re-check that the keyboard is still listed under Settings and that Full Access is on, since a rare glitch can drop those.

As a last resort, delete the app and reinstall it from the App Store, then repeat Fix 1 and Fix 3 to re-add the keyboard and re-grant Full Access. A clean reinstall resolves the uncommon case where the keyboard extension did not register correctly on first install.

Why iPhone makes you do this in the first place

It is reasonable to wonder why a keyboard you clearly installed does not just work. The answer is iOS's security model. Every third-party keyboard runs in a tightly sandboxed extension, isolated from the app you are typing in and from the rest of the system. By default that sandbox cannot reach the network at all, which is why a fresh keyboard is inert until you both add it and, for anything that needs to send data, grant Full Access.

Apple built these gates so that no keyboard can quietly start transmitting keystrokes without you making a deliberate choice. The trade-off is the extra setup you just walked through: install, add, switch, and grant access. For a voice keyboard the network step is not incidental, it is the whole point, because turning speech into text is a cloud operation. Knowing this makes the warnings feel less alarming. You are not disabling a protection so much as opening the one specific door the keyboard needs, and Voice Keyboard Pro keeps only operational pings on its servers rather than your audio or your dictated text.

This same architecture is why the keyboard vanishes in password fields and why a background app can hold onto a stale keyboard list until you force-quit it. None of it is a malfunction. It is the platform doing exactly what it was designed to do, and once you have completed the one-time grants, the friction disappears.

Getting the most out of it once it appears

After the keyboard is showing and the mic works, a couple of small habits make it feel effortless. First, if you reach for the mic constantly, press and hold the globe key to jump straight to Voice Keyboard Pro rather than cycling through every keyboard one tap at a time; it becomes muscle memory within a day. Second, give the mic a beat after you tap it before you start talking, so your first word is not clipped, a habit worth keeping with any voice input. Third, keep the phone at a natural distance rather than up against your mouth, since proximity that is too close can distort more than it helps.

Beyond plain dictation, the iPhone keyboard also carries Voice Edit, where you speak a correction instead of retyping, and two-way translation across 24 languages while you dictate. Those only matter once the keyboard is actually reachable, which is the whole reason this setup is worth getting right. If you type on your Mac too, the same voice-to-text experience lives in the menu bar there, so the muscle memory carries across both devices.

The quick checklist

When the voice keyboard is not showing, run through these in order and you will resolve almost every case:

Frequently asked questions

Why does my third-party keyboard keep disappearing after I switch apps?

Two things cause this. Either you switched into an app with a secure field, which forces the built-in keyboard, or the app was already open in the background before you added the keyboard. Force-quitting the app usually settles it, and normal text fields will keep the voice keyboard available.

Do I really need Full Access on?

For the microphone and transcription, yes. A cloud voice keyboard sends audio to be turned into text, and iOS requires Full Access for that. Voice Keyboard Pro stores only operational pings on its servers, not your audio or your transcribed text, so no dictation is retained as a transcript.

The keyboard shows but there is no mic button. What is wrong?

You are most likely looking at a different keyboard, or the layout has not fully loaded. Press and hold the globe key to confirm Voice Keyboard Pro is the active one. If it is active and the mic is still greyed out, enable Full Access, which the mic depends on.

Will this work on iPad too?

The same Settings path and globe-key switching apply on iPad. Add the keyboard, switch to it, and enable Full Access. If you split your work between devices, our note on choosing a voice keyboard for iPhone covers what to look for.

Once it is showing, it just works

Nearly every "voice keyboard not showing on iPhone" report comes down to the add-and-switch step or the Full Access toggle. Both are one-time setup, and once they are done the keyboard behaves like any other, available with a tap of the globe key in every app that allows third-party keyboards. From there you get a mic button in every text field, so you can speak instead of thumb-type at 40 words per minute and let your words land at the pace you actually talk.

Voice Keyboard Pro is free to try on iPhone, with a daily limit on the free tier and Pro at $4.99 per month or $34.99 per year. Add the keyboard, flip on Full Access, and dictate anywhere.