Build watchOS Apps: Develop and Design

Chapter 11. Accepting User Input

Taps of the finger and clicks of the digital crown can go a long way to getting all the input needed from your app’s users, but sometimes it’s necessary to capture a word, a sentence, or more of textual input. With larger devices, this is trivial; whether a keyboard has physical keys or is presented onscreen, we’re used to tapping away quickly to “say” what we need. Apple Watch is different. It simply does not have enough room for a keyboard, but through some clever ideas and technology we can receive our users’ words all the same.

Speech to Text

In the absence of a keyboard, there are three ways to provide text input to a watch app:

The app can provide prepared strings that are presented to the user as options. ...