Is there any way to disable dictation support of a UITextField?

Question

So I'm working on a tvos app in swift and I was wondering if it's possible to disable dictation support for a custom UITextField. It doesn't really work well for it and I don't want the user to be able to do so

Answer 1

Did you try to use the textfield's keyboardType property? Maybe you can change the text input type, so the dictation function is automatically not shown.

Documentation: https://developer.apple.com/library/tvos/documentation/UIKit/Reference/UITextInputTraits_Protocol/index.html#//apple_ref/occ/intfp/UITextInputTraits/keyboardType

Answer 2

This is a Swift 4 solution based on @BadPirate's hack. It will trigger the initial bell sound stating that dictation started, but the dictation layout will never appear on the keyboard.

This will not hide the dictation button from your keyboard: for that the only option seems to be to use an email layout with UIKeyboardType.emailAddress.

---

In viewDidLoad of the view controller owning the UITextField for which you want to disable dictation:

// Track if the keyboard mode changed to discard dictation
NotificationCenter.default.addObserver(self,
                                       selector: #selector(keyboardModeChanged),
                                       name: UITextInputMode.currentInputModeDidChangeNotification,
                                       object: nil)

Then the custom callback:

@objc func keyboardModeChanged(notification: Notification) {
    // Could use `Selector("identifier")` instead for idSelector but
    // it would trigger a warning advising to use #selector instead
    let idSelector = #selector(getter: UILayoutGuide.identifier)

    // Check if the text input mode is dictation
    guard
        let textField = yourTextField as? UITextField
        let mode = textField.textInputMode,
        mode.responds(to: idSelector),
        let id = mode.perform(idSelector)?.takeUnretainedValue() as? String,
        id.contains("dictation") else {
            return
    }

    // If the keyboard is in dictation mode, hide
    // then show the keyboard without animations
    // to display the initial generic keyboard
    UIView.setAnimationsEnabled(false)
    textField.resignFirstResponder()
    textField.becomeFirstResponder()
    UIView.setAnimationsEnabled(true)

    // Do additional update here to inform your
    // user that dictation is disabled
}