Apple has acknowledged a series of bugs affecting Voice Control in macOS 26, the company’s built-in accessibility feature that allows people to fully operate a Mac by voice.
Over the past week, users have reported that several key commands are not working as expected, with some issues seriously impacting productivity. After a detailed bug report was submitted, Apple’s accessibility team confirmed it is aware of the problems and has passed them on to engineering for investigation.
The bugs
The issues confirmed by Apple include:
• “Delete that” command malfunctioning — instead of deleting the last dictated phrase, the command only removes the final character.
• Invisible cursor in Mail — while dictating, the text caret disappears halfway through a line, making it impossible to see where edits will apply.
• “New paragraph” command ignored — the command fails to insert a paragraph break and is transcribed as plain text instead.
• Lag with “new line” — a two-second delay occurs before a line break is inserted, slowing down natural dictation flow.
Apple describes how these commands should work in its official Voice Control support page.
All four bugs are reproducible in macOS 26 across multiple apps, including TextEdit, Notes, Safari, Pages, and Mail.
Apple’s response
In a reply to the report, Apple wrote:
“We understand you are experiencing several issues, including with the ‘delete that’ and ‘new paragraph’ commands, the cursor becoming invisible in Mail, and a delay with the ‘new line’ command. We want to assure you that Apple is aware of these issues and our teams are currently investigating.”
The company added that it appreciated the detailed documentation and has forwarded the information to the relevant teams.
Why it matters
Voice Control has been a headline accessibility feature on macOS since its introduction in 2019, designed to give disabled people the ability to control every aspect of their computer by voice. For those who rely on it as their primary interface, these bugs are more than an inconvenience. With macOS 26 now widely available, affected users will be looking to Apple for timely fixes in upcoming software updates.
These Voice Control bugs in macOS 26 highlight how fragile Apple’s dictation tools remain for those who depend on them every day. There have also been calls for Apple to take inspiration from third-party tools such as Aqua Voice, which use AI to deliver a faster, more accurate dictation experience than Voice Control currently offers.
We’ve previously explored whether Apple will address these long-standing Voice Control limitations in our WWDC 2025 Voice Control analysis.
Have you noticed any other issues with Voice Control in macOS 26? Share your experiences in the comments below — we’ll keep tracking Apple’s fixes as they roll out.
