Unintuitively, you can disable the key on the stock keyboard.

You go to Settings and turn Dictation on. (Yes, I know, bear with me.) THEN, you turn it off.

And that should cause the button to disappear. It's really unintuitive, I know.

Well, I'll be damn, it worked. Two years an iPhone user and never managed to hide the damn icon until now, maybe it was too intuitive for me.

You guys don’t use dictation? Huh.

I would use it if Apple's transcription was more accurate. It just ends up frustrating me more often that not.

Apple's dictation is so accurate 80% of the time I send replies to messages on my Apple Watch (unless they are long or detailed) and 90% of that time I never, ever have to make a correction. It's something that sold me on the watch.

In other words it is wrong 10% of times, for short and simple messages.

Google is miles ahead with accuracy. Shame you can't switch providers...

This is another problem I have with stock iOS—third party keyboards randomly revert back to the Apple keyboard on password entry screens!

I 100% understand why Apple does this, but a keyboard that randomly changes to a different keyboard under some circumstances is completely unusable to me. My brain needs consistency.