Apple’s iOS 8 beta 4 just hit the interwebs today, and among the new features found therein, there’s a cool new visualization of the iOS dictation feature (seen in the MacRumors video above) that shows your words being transcribed almost in real-time as you say them. It’s a feature that previously appeared in Siri, but it’s new to the dictate option found in Messages and other places with text entry, and it’s pretty darn cool.
This live text rendering is something that Microsoft also made a big deal about with Cortana, but it’s a feature that has more value than just impressing the pants off of users. It provides you with a live preview of what your phone is interpreting from your speech, which means that if you spot an error or it makes a mistake, you can see it as it happens instead of having to wait for the whole message to be processed and rendered as text.
That should make for fewer errors and less frustration using the feature overall, which is more than just an aesthetically pleasing side effect of what is still also indeed a very cool thing to look at.