| API key | — | Fetches speech models from your Exchange and reaches your files and your AI. Stored encrypted. Typing needs nothing from it, and neither does dictating once a model is on the phone. Under Your key on the Files tab. |
| Keyboard layout | QWERTY | QWERTY, Dvorak, left hand or right hand. The two one-handed layouts are QWERTY docked to that thumb. |
| Start on keyboard | Off | Opens on letters instead of the microphone. |
| Check the whole sentence | On | When you end a sentence or stop typing, reads every finished sentence in the box for a word that is spelled correctly and wrong anyway - form for from, then for than. Autocorrect cannot catch those, because nothing is wrong with the word until you see what came after it. The check key on the shortcut row shows a count of what it found, a turning ring while it reads, and a tick when there is nothing to fix; tap it to go through each one. Nothing is applied by itself. |
| Slide to spell a word | Off | Draw through the letters without lifting your finger and the word is worked out from the path rather than from the keys you crossed. Off by default: with it off the keyboard types exactly as it does now, and sliding across two keys still types both of them. |
| Show the trail | On | Draws the line your finger leaves while you slide, so you can see the gesture is being followed rather than ignored - and once you lift, marks the letters the word was read as, numbered in order, until you start the next word. It draws nothing unless sliding is switched on. |
| Key hints | On | Lights the two or three letters most likely to come next, from the same dictionary that does the correcting - and when a correction fires, briefly names the key your finger actually landed on. Off colours each letter of the word instead. |
| Learn where your taps land | On | Notices where your finger lands on each letter key and, once a key has been tapped thirty times and leans one way, moves the target of that key to meet you. The middle of every key always stays its own, so it can only ever change which way a tap near an edge goes. Counts and averages per key, never what you typed, never uploaded, and shown to you on the figures screen. Off is the keyboard exactly as it was. |
| Key feel strength | Normal | How hard every key buzzes: light, normal or strong. Every key keeps its own feel - the spacebar’s two ticks, the hold’s rising pair - only scaled together, so they stay tellable apart at any strength. |
| Cut the silence out first | On | A small detector, fetched with the first model, finds where the speech is in a recording so the engine on the phone hears speech and never silence: no words invented from a quiet room, and a long recording cut at its pauses rather than mid-word. Padded on both sides of every stretch, and a recording it hears nothing in goes to the engine whole, so it can cost silence but never words. The speed line says what it cut. |
| Run the engine on | The processor, until the test picks | The processor, which every model runs on, or the phone’s accelerator by one of two routes. Measured, not assumed: the button under it works out your newest recording on each route, twice, and picks the fastest one that gives the same words - at least 15% faster, no more than one word in ten changed. It runs by itself the first time a model is in use with a recording to time, and the line it writes says what each route did. An accelerator that refuses a model falls back to the processor by itself, and the speed line says where the engine actually ran. |
| Keep the model loaded | 10 minutes after use | How long the speech model stays in memory after a dictation. Unload after each one for the least memory, at the cost of loading it again every time; Always for the fastest dictation, at the cost of holding a few hundred megabytes - it holds on when the phone asks for memory back, and loads again as the keyboard opens if Android closed it. The model loads while you speak either way. |
| Engine effort | Normal, 4 cores | How many of the phone's cores the speech engine may use. Battery saver uses two and takes longer; fastest uses every core and runs warmest. |
| Recordings kept | Audio for the newest 25, text for all | How many dictations keep their audio, and how many keep their text, on the phone. Two numbers you type in, as high as you like, or 0 for no limit at all; about a megabyte a minute for audio. Under Your data, beside the store it governs. |
| Histories kept | Clips, the newest 100 for 7 days; sent messages 50; AI answers 200; addresses 200 | How much of each history stays on the phone: clips and for how many days, sent messages, AI answers and rewordings, addresses. Five numbers you type in under Your data, as high as you like, or 0 for no limit at all. Every one stays on the phone, encrypted where it holds text. |
| Clipboard history | On | Hold the paste key for everything you copied recently, newest first, with how long ago. Kept on the phone, encrypted, and cleared after a day. Records nothing while a password field is open. |
| Remember addresses | On | Keeps the websites and email addresses you type, so the keyboard can offer them back when a field asks for one - a browser address bar, a sign-in email box. Kept on the phone, encrypted, capped at 200, and never sent anywhere. Records nothing while a password field is open. |
| Smarter word splitting | On | Works out where a missing space belongs using a language model rather than a set of rules - so "figurout" becomes "figure out". Fixes more and gets fewer wrong. Off falls back to the rules. |
| Underline as you type | On | Shows the word you are typing underlined in the app itself, the way other keyboards do. Turn it off if an app misbehaves while you type. |
| Text preview | On | A mirror of the field you are typing into, for apps that hide it behind the keyboard. Turn it off and the keyboard is a row shorter — you lose the clear button, the correction badge and tap-to-move-cursor with it. |
| Number row | On | Shows a dedicated row of digits. Hidden in landscape regardless — ?123 still reaches every digit in one tap. |
| Autocomplete | On | The suggestion strip above the keys. |
| Autocorrect | On | Fixes a word when you finish it. Always undoable. |
| Aggressive correction | Off | Corrects on weaker evidence. |
| Underline mistakes | On | Misspelled words in red, and the sentence check's in amber. Tap one for its fixes. Set with the three above by the Autocorrect level. |
| Grammar rules | On | The on-device i/I and a/an fixes. |
| Long-press accents | Off | Hold a letter for its accented forms. |
| Haptic feedback | On | Vibration on each key. |
| Keypress sound | Off | The system keyboard click. |
| Dictation sounds | On | A short tone when recording starts, when the words arrive, and when they do not. Recording is the one thing here you cannot watch while it happens. |
| Accent colour | Teal | Tints the action keys. |
| Send diagnostics | On | Uploads the counts-only diagnostics log. Switch it off and nothing is sent. |