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Dictation microphone and scribble area not showing when attempting to reply to a text

I'm on the latest watch OS (8.4.1), I have all siri capabilities turned on on my phone (iOS 15.3) and dictation turned on on my apple watch series 6 and now when I tap in the text field to reply to a text alert or after going into the messages app and into a thread, it just shows cancel top left, send top right, a blinking text cursor, and the emoji icon in the bottom left. No scribble pad area that used to be there in the center nor the dictation microphone icon in the bottom right. It's driving me insane and significantly decreasing the usefulness of having the watch in the first place. any idea what is going on here?

Apple Watch Series 6

Posted on Feb 3, 2022 5:28 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Feb 3, 2022 7:28 PM

The first (and simplest) thing to try if something isn’t working right is to restart your Apple Watch and its paired iPhone. If necessary (device not responding), try a forced restart. Both methods can be found here:

How to restart your Apple Watch - Apple Support

Restart your iPhone - Apple Support


If that doesn't help, the next steps would be to unpair and pair your watch again and restore from the backup just created. This should result in no loss of data. It deletes all temp and corrupted files and re-indexes the file system.

Unpair and erase your Apple Watch - Apple Support

Set up your Apple Watch - Apple Support


1 reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Feb 3, 2022 7:28 PM in response to tthielen

The first (and simplest) thing to try if something isn’t working right is to restart your Apple Watch and its paired iPhone. If necessary (device not responding), try a forced restart. Both methods can be found here:

How to restart your Apple Watch - Apple Support

Restart your iPhone - Apple Support


If that doesn't help, the next steps would be to unpair and pair your watch again and restore from the backup just created. This should result in no loss of data. It deletes all temp and corrupted files and re-indexes the file system.

Unpair and erase your Apple Watch - Apple Support

Set up your Apple Watch - Apple Support


Dictation microphone and scribble area not showing when attempting to reply to a text

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