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The original was posted on /r/tifu by /u/Top-Relative6976 on 2026-02-07 05:30:32+00:00.
This happened a few months ago, but I only fully realized the consequences this week.
My mom is not great with technology. She can text and scroll Facebook, but anything beyond that becomes a full family event. She asked me to help clean up her phone because it was “acting weird.” By that, she meant she had 40 open browser tabs and no storage.
I went through and closed things, deleted duplicate photos, cleared apps she didn’t use. Then I noticed she had accidentally turned on voice-to-text for everything. I turned it off and showed her how to type normally again.
She nodded like she understood.
Two days later she called me furious because her phone “wasn’t listening to her anymore.” She had apparently gotten used to yelling entire messages at her phone and assumed that was just how phones worked now.
She made me come back over and turn it back on.
Now she refuses to type. Every text I get from her is a dictated paragraph with zero punctuation and several emotional asides spoken out loud, including things like “delete that” which never get deleted.
I broke something that cannot be unbroken.
TL;DR: Tried to fix my mom’s phone, accidentally taught her to exclusively use voice-to-text forever.