GoKawiilOver the past couple of weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to test SpeakON, a magnetic, AI-powered dictation accessory that snaps onto the back of the iPhone and refines transcriptions based on preset preferences. Here’s how it did.
‘The world’s first voice typing device for iPhone’
As I’ve written before, I find the idea of AI-powered voice-based interactions intriguing, particularly when it comes to the possibility of AI agents getting things done across multiple apps on our behalf.
And while we’re still a little ways away from seeing that promise play out in full, we’re already starting to see what those early building blocks look like in practice, especially through more focused, task-specific devices.
One such device is SpeakON, a magnetic dictation accessory that snaps onto the back of the iPhone and acts as a physical shortcut for turning speech into text directly in any app.
SpeakON can transcribe and clean up speech on the fly, adapting its tone depending on the app you’re using. Additionally, it can structure your thoughts into lists, or easily translate text from dictation.
I had the opportunity to test SpeakON, and I’ll be the first to say it: convincing someone to buy a single-purpose piece of AI hardware that many would say could just as easily be an app is a tough job, especially given how limited third-party hardware access to the iPhone still is.
Thankfully, that is not my job. My job is to relay my experience with it, which was surprisingly positive.
The good
Setting up SpeakON was extremely easy. The Bluetooth pairing worked flawlessly, and the onboarding tutorial was actually useful for learning how to configure the accessory in the SpeakON app and then use it as the system-wide input keyboard.
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