iOS 8 3rd-party keyboards and voice dictation? Not so fast...

iOS 8's addition of third-party keyboard support may answer one of the most common requests among iPhone owners, but not all keyboards are created equal. While the first add-on keyboards – such as SwiftKey and Fleksy – are already showing up in the App Store, they're all missing one key button: voice dictation.

That, as users who've already updated their iPhones and iPads to iOS 8 have discovered, is because the button to trigger voice recognition is only present on Apple's own keyboard.

As we noted in our iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus review, it's not an unintentional layout omission, either. In fact, Apple doesn't expose the voice dictation API to third-party developers at this point.

So, if you want to use an alternative keyboard, you'll have to do without easy access to dictation. Switching between layouts is relatively easy – hit the globe icon and you get a list of all the keyboards installed – but it might prove fiddly if you're trying to reply to a message while driving.

Whether Apple will change its policy and allow third-party keyboards to access dictation remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the company's own keyboard has seen a significant improvement in iOS 8, with better word prediction and auto-completion.