Keyspoken / Why Keyspoken has no keyboard
Why Keyspoken has no keyboard
Most dictation apps replace your keyboard to add one microphone button. Keyspoken leaves your keyboard alone and does one job. Here is the reasoning.
You already have a good keyboard. We built the part it is missing.
The trade nobody asked for
On iPhone, the only way an app can put text into another app is to be a keyboard. So dictation apps ship a keyboard. A whole one: letters, numbers, autocorrect, predictions, all rebuilt from scratch so that one microphone button has somewhere to live.
You install it for the dictation. What you get is a different keyboard. The keys sit slightly elsewhere. Autocorrect guesses differently. Your thumbs, which have typed on the same layout for years, start missing.
What we did instead
Keyspoken is a keyboard as far as iOS is concerned, but it has no letter keys. It is a short strip with one large button. You switch to it when you want to talk, and it hands you back the moment your words are in.
Typing never moves. It stays on Apple's keyboard, with the layout, the autocorrect and the muscle memory you already have.
The four rules we built it on
- It is not a keyboard. It does one job: put what you said at the cursor.
- The best interaction is none. It starts by itself, stops by itself and leaves by itself.
- Every control is about the dictation in progress. Start, finish, cancel, undo. Typing belongs to your keyboard.
- It always says what it is doing. In words, never by color alone.
The two keys we kept
Delete and return. After you dictate, the two things you most often want are to fix a slip or send the message. Those two keys let you do both without switching back first.
What it costs you
One honest trade: to dictate, you switch keyboards with the globe key. Keyspoken makes that the only step. It listens as it opens and switches you back when it is done, so the whole thing is one gesture and a sentence.