it's remarkable how terrible apple's voice-to-text capabilities are (relative to at least openAI's) -- is there any way to change this on your phone? Having experienced openAI's, I basically never use apple's anymore bc it's so frustrating

Depending on the use case you could use ChatGPT on the phone or whisper based local apps (to convert voice to text)

any apps you'd recommend? will give it a google/search later. Ideally it'd be baked in but maybe if used via shortcuts the ux will be almost as good

ChatGPT native app is not bad and you could make a shortcut that just opens it etc.

Whisperboard is a simple app to transcribe:
https://apps.apple.com/fen/app/whisperboard/id1661442906

There are many of these types but haven’t really used much any of them.

This is brilliant for mac: https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper

The dev has other LLM utility apps as well.