Better way of using the iPhone with a Bluetooth speaker

Question

I got a Bluetooth wireless speaker and it is great in many ways. I can listen to podcasts and music without wires to get in the way.

I have one small first-world problem. If i want to type up a quick text message, it lags because it seems that for each character typed it has to play the sound on the bluetooth speaker. It probably takes time to send each audio snippet. This is not horrible, but oh well.

The problem is much worse when I use speech recognition to "type" a message. It insists on using the microphone on the bluetooth speaker and seeing how it is not right in front of me - the speech recognition fails almost always. Or comes up with unbelievably hilarious renderings of what I said.

Siri has a workaround for this: when I bring it up, it has a small bluetooth icon in the bottom left where I can select the audio source. But the speech recognition applet on the keyboard does not.

Or am I missing something simple here?

P.S. I looked at the bluetooth references for the device - the only thing there is to "Forget the Device".

Answer 1

I figured out my own answer, so hopefully this helps whomever runs into this problem.

Bring up Siri by holding down the Home button. It will come up and on the bottom left you'll see Audio source indicator, pictured below (and highlighted in yellow).

As you can see, it has a grey background. Tap on it and you'll get a menu of audio sources (typically your phone and the Bluetooth device). Select your phone. The icon will get a white background indicate that you successfully changed the audio source.

Now switch back to your Text Messaging application and the tap the microphone button on the keyboard and it will now use the phone microphone instead of the one on the Bluetooth device.

Answer 2

Flick your phone on silent. Seems to stop the issue with iPhone 5 and Nixon Blaster.