Dictatekeyboard Updates & Release Notes

Dictate 6.4.0 is a release about doing more on the phone itself, and more of it your way. It translates as you type, on the device, in 49 languages — nothing you type is sent anywhere. Both symbol pages can hold the symbols you choose, with the long presses you choose. xAI's Grok, Scaleway and OVHcloud join the providers, and offline, Parakeet Ultra replaces Parakeet v3 at the same size with clearly fewer errors. A command word turns a spoken sentence into an instruction, and the whole app went through a privacy and security audit. Underneath that: suggestions that read slips, glide typing that finds accented words, and a long list of dictation fixes. Updating shows a new What's-new tour for 6.4; every tour stays re-viewable under Settings › About.

🌐 Translate as you type (#424, #433)

• Open Translate in the Smartbar, type into the field above it, and the app's field fills with the translation. It works like Gboard's bar: a field of its own with a cursor and suggestions, and each update replaces the previous one in a single edit — but only while the app's field still ends with what was written, so nothing of yours is ever deleted. …

Mozilla's Firefox Translations models for the keyboard's on-device translator (issue #424): the translate bar in the Smartbar translates what you type into the text field, entirely on the phone.

49 languages, both directions each. Mozilla trains every model to or from English, so a language here is two models — xx→en and en→xx — and a pair of two other languages is translated through English. Only models Mozilla has released in both directions are included: for each direction the "Release Android" model where Mozilla ships one to Firefox for Android (a smaller one than the desktop build), otherwise "Release". Languages released one way only (Croatian, Serbian, Albanian, Azerbaijani, Bosnian, …) are left out, and Norwegian is here once: Mozilla's no model is byte for byte its nb (Bokmål) one.

Files Three per direction — the model (model.xxen.intgemm.alphas.bin), the lexical shortlist (lex.50.50.xxen.s2t.bin) and the SentencePiece vocabulary (vocab.xxen.spm, or a srcvocab/trgvocab pair) — gzip-compressed exactly as Mozilla serves them. The app checks every file against the size and SHA-256 in TranslationModels.kt before unpacking it. A language costs 30–75 MB to download and 43–106 MB on the device; the base models are ~31 MB unpacked per direction, the "tiny" ones ~17 MB. …

Dictate 6.3.0 is a release about reaching more of the keyboard without leaving it. It can read printed text off a photo — an IBAN, a serial number, the Wi-Fi password on the back of a router — and it does that without ever asking for the camera permission. The cursor, the selection and the clipboard finally share one editing panel instead of eleven keys you had to know about, the number pad can be asked for by name, and any Smartbar button can carry a second action under a long press, paired by you rather than by us. The floating button gets a hold menu and a list of the apps it is welcome in. Offline dictation gets models that actually fit on a phone, forty more Eastern languages, and a picker that is ten rows instead of twenty-four. Updating shows a new What's-new tour for 6.3, eight pages with live artwork; every tour stays re-viewable under Settings › About.

📷 Scan text (#390)

• Point the camera at printed text and it lands in the field you were typing in. An IBAN off a letter, a serial number off a box, an address off a parcel — the cases where retyping is the whole cost. Every recognised line comes back as a tappable region: take the ones you want, approve, done. …

Dictate 6.2.0 is a release about the keyboard knowing you. It learns the words you type — the names and terms no dictionary has ever heard of — and keeps them on your device, in a list you can read and prune. It comes with five new designs, two of which let the app behind show through the gaps between the keys. It can be split in two so both thumbs reach it, it finds the emoji for the word you just typed in about fifty languages, and it brings a handful of small tools you will end up using daily: incognito mode, links without their tracking tails, an inline calculator, a selection counter and a searchable clipboard. Updating shows a new What's-new tour for 6.2, twelve pages with live artwork; every tour stays re-viewable under Settings › About.

🧠 It learns the words you type (#318, #375, #242)

• A name, a term or a place you type often enough is kept. The keyboard stops marking it as a mistake, starts offering it in the strip, and starts correcting into it — a word you invented is no longer a word the autocorrect fights. …

Per-language tables of three-word phrases, used to suggest the next word from the two words before the cursor instead of one (issue #334).

Format w1 w2 w3<TAB>count, lowercased, UTF-8, sorted by key — same shape and the same reason as the word-pair tables: the app binary-searches a flat blob, so key order means a linear load rather than sorting 100 000 keys per language. Read by frequency with sort -t$'\t' -k2 -rn <file>.

Why a separate tier rather than simply larger pair tables. Measured on held-out text: after a function word — "the", "to", "of", where 46 % of all predictions are asked for — five times as many pairs are worth exactly nothing (20.4 % → 20.4 % top-3 in English, 15.9 % → 15.9 % in German). Only a second word of context adds anything there. The converse holds too: after a rare word these triples are worth almost nothing and only more pairs help. They are complements, so both shipped together.

100 000 entries because the gain saturates early: 50 000 already buys 4.0 of the 5.3 points available after a function word, 100 000 buys 4.6, and the last 0.7 would cost two and a half times the bytes. …

Dictate 6.1.2 is a small release: mostly repairs, plus a few things that were missing. Like 6.1.1 it installs quietly — no what's-new tour, no update notice.

✨ New

• Hindi is laid out the way Hindi is taught. (#315) The varnamala layout is now the default, the vowel row shows the matra it is about to attach, and the number row carries Devanagari digits — per language, so no other layout is affected.
• Russian can mark where the stress falls. (#328) Long-press a vowel for its accented form.
• The sticker panel grew up. (#317, #308) Search stickers by name, drag packs into your own order, give every folder back its own favourites and recents, and optionally be asked before a sticker is sent.
• The emoji and media panels match the rest of the keyboard. Search sits where the categories are, categories scroll sideways, and every panel header uses the same icon size.

🐛 Fixed

• A floating dictation could land in the wrong field. (#310) It used to search the whole window for something editable — Chrome's address bar, WhatsApp's message box — and pull the cursor there first. It now writes only where the input focus already is.
• "Green check, but no text" now asks the field itself. The read-back used to go through the same connection as the write, so a dictation into an editor the app had discarded was faithfully reported as having arrived.
• Autocorrect no longer eats the digit in top10. (#311) …

Dictate 6.1.1 is a bugfix release, and it installs the way a bugfix release should: no what's-new tour, no update notice, nothing to dismiss.

🐛 Fixed

• Opening the GIF panel could take the keyboard down. (#307) KLIPY sometimes returns the same GIF twice within one page of results. The grid identifies its tiles by that id, and a repeated one throws out of Compose's measure pass — which kills the keyboard mid-sentence, in whatever app you were typing in. Results are now deduplicated as they arrive, on the first page as well as on every page scrolled in after it. Present since 5.1.0.
• A fresh install is no longer made to catch up on every past release. Nothing is shown when you first install, because there is nothing to catch up on — but that also meant the "already seen" mark was never written, and the next update, whichever one it turned out to be, replayed all six what's-new tours back to back and opened a changelog listing every release since 5.0.
• A patch release no longer announces itself. The changelog dialog, the "Dictate was updated" notice on the keyboard and the floating-button spotlight are tied to feature releases now, not to every version number. Skipping 6.1.0 and landing here still shows you what 6.1 brought.

If 6.1.0 has been working for you and you don't use the GIF panel, there is nothing in this release you will notice. That is the intention.

Dictate 6.1.0 is a release about the things you do around dictating. Point the keyboard at a folder and it becomes a sticker panel. Share a voice message to Dictate and it tells you what it says — no field to find, no button to press. And the autocorrect finally catches the ordinary typo, the one it was built not to see. Updating shows a new What's-new tour for 6.1; every tour stays re-viewable under Settings › About.

🖼️ Your own stickers (#280)

• Point Dictate at a folder and its pictures become stickers. Subfolders turn into tabs, each with its own favourites and recents. No account, no catalogue, no upload — the folder is the feature.
• Add one from any app through the share sheet, and delete one without leaving the keyboard.
• What a chat app accepts is not what it says it accepts. WhatsApp asks for image/webp.wasticker and never plain image/webp, then validates what arrives under that name and answers an oversized sticker with an empty frame; Signal takes an animated WebP and shows a single frame of it. So each sticker is brought into one shape — 512×512 WebP within budget — once, on the way into the folder, and inserting is a lookup and a commit.
• Two derivatives cover the rest: a PNG for an app without WebP, and a GIF, written by hand because Android cannot encode one, for an app that would otherwise freeze the animation.

🎧 Share a voice message to Dictate (#301, from #300) …

Dictate 6.0.0 adds a second way in: buy credit instead of bringing your own API key. Your own key — and your own server, and models on the device — keep working exactly as before and remain the cheaper path; nothing about the app requires the new one. Alongside that: Chinese typed the way it is actually typed, seven languages that had no dictionary at all, emoji search in over forty languages, and recordings that cost less to transcribe. Updating shows a new What's-new tour for 6.0 — and every tour stays re-viewable under Settings › About.

☁️ Dictate Cloud (optional)

• Buy minutes instead of finding an API key — four prepaid packs through Google Play (150, 400, 1000 and 2200 minutes; the larger ones cost noticeably less per minute, and the app shows by how much). Dictation and rewording then run through our server.
• Nothing of yours is stored there. Neither your recordings nor your text are written to disk: they are passed straight to the provider and the answer comes back. What is kept is numbers — wallet id, timestamp, duration, token counts, status code, milliseconds.
• The server's source is in this repository, under cloud/. The privacy policy makes claims about that server, and a claim you can read the source of is worth more than one you have to take on trust. cloud/src/meter.ts is the only file that writes anything. …

Downloadable keyboard language packs (.flex extensions), fetched on demand when a subtype that needs one is added. Not part of the APK.

Chinese Pinyin — net.devemperor.dictate.pinyin.flex

The reading table behind the Chinese (Simplified) — Pinyin subtype (issue #262). Built by tools/pinyin-dict/generate.py:

• Readings from CC-CEDICT (MDBG), CC BY-SA 4.0 — the generated table is a derivative and carries the same license.
• Ranking from the OPUS OpenSubtitles zh_cn frequency list.
• Words the dictionary does not list get their reading composed from per-character statistics learned from CC-CEDICT itself (98.8% accurate under leave-one-out).

Full sources and rationale: tools/pinyin-dict/ATTRIBUTION.md.

Dictate 5.3.0 is about the two things you do most: talking to your phone and typing on it. The mic key can now be held like a voice message, autocorrect was rebuilt to read where your fingers actually land, on-device models write while you speak, and 45 languages that had been missing are back. Updating shows a new What's-new tour for 5.3 — and every tour stays re-viewable under Settings › About.

🎤 Push to talk

• Hold the mic, release to send — like a voice message: hold the mic key and talk, let go and it goes. Slide left to throw the recording away, drag up to lock it hands-free. A quick tap still starts a recording the way it always did, so nothing you already knew stops working. Opt-in under the Dictate settings. (#235)
• The held mic grows out of the key it replaces without jumping, keeps its centre wherever the key sits, and behaves the same with or without the rewording row. It works in real-time mode too, and it deliberately stays out of the classic keyboard-free layout, where the record button already owns the press.

⌨️ Typing

• Autocorrect, rebuilt — corrections are now decided from the touch coordinates, searching the likely words with a beam search as you type, instead of guessing from the finished word. On our test set that moved accuracy from 88.4% to 97.9%; the difference shows up most on fast, sloppy typing. (#242)
• German nouns are capitalised even when typed in lowercase. (#242) …

Dictate 5.2.0 takes dictation beyond Dictate's own keyboard: it can now act as your phone's system-wide voice input, run a freeform spoken command from anywhere, and clean up long dictations on its own. Updating shows a new What's-new tour for 5.2 — and every tour stays re-viewable under Settings › About.

🎙️ Dictate from anywhere

• System-wide voice input — Dictate now registers through all three of Android's voice-input mechanisms (a voice input IME, a RecognitionService, and the classic speech popup), so the mic key in other keyboards and apps can transcribe through Dictate — with your provider, your prompts and your on-device models. Enable "Dictate voice input" in your keyboard list and pick it as your voice input method. Because it's a real input method, it also works in apps that block the accessibility-based floating button. (Note: Gboard hardwires its mic to Google and won't use a third-party voice input.) (#67, #237)
• Freeform voice command on the floating button — long-press the button, tap Live prompt, and just say what you want: "write a polite decline for tomorrow's meeting", "translate the text above to Spanish". Selected text is used as context; with nothing selected the AI writes from scratch. (#230) …

Dictate 5.1.0 builds on the 5.0 milestone with a transcription history, long-form dictation, GIF search and a big classic-layout upgrade. Updating from 5.0 shows a new What's-new tour for 5.1; coming from an older version, you'll get the 5.0 tour first and then 5.1 — and every tour stays re-viewable under Settings › About.

🎙️ Transcription & AI

• Transcription history — every dictation is kept in a searchable history. Re-insert a past transcript with a tap, replay the original audio, re-transcribe it, or pin the ones you reuse; a dedicated screen manages everything, including how long audio is retained. (#140)
• Long-form dictation — speak for as long as you like. Long recordings are split into segments and transcribed in the background as you go, so you get your text sooner and never hit a length limit. (#170)
• German offline model — Parakeet German (primeline) transcribes entirely on-device, no internet needed. (#176)
• Claude (Anthropic) joins as a new provider for rewording and formatting your dictations.
• Model downloads run in the background — on-device model downloads keep going when you close the dialog or leave the app, with an ongoing progress notification. (#207)
• Pick the active transcription language directly in settings. (#174)
• The stop button now truly cancels an in-flight transcription or rewording — no more paying for a request you've already stopped. (#192) …

Dictate 5.0.0 is the biggest update since 4.0 — the first time you open the app after updating, a new What's-new tour walks you through the highlights and drops you straight into each setting.

⌨️ Keyboard & typing

• Glide typing — swipe across the keys to type whole words, with per-language dictionaries that download on demand. (#127)
• Word suggestions, spell check & autocorrect — on by default, with SwiftKey/Gboard-style ranking (keyboard-proximity noisy-channel + bigram context across 34 languages). (#127)
• Gboard-style autocorrect UX — the auto-applied candidate is bolded and the word you actually typed stays tappable in the suggestion strip, so one tap undoes a correction. (#150)
• Classic keyboard-less "legacy" dictation layout — the pure voice screen from Dictate 3 is back: set it as your default (locked) or keep it a horizontal swipe away from the full keyboard, with number-pad + system-emoji overlays, space-swipe cursor movement and hold-backspace multi-character selection. (#125)
• Bigger emojis with tighter spacing (#148), Select-all is now a toggle that reflects the field's selection (#152), a new high-contrast E-Reader / E-Ink theme (#54), and accent auto-contrast (black text/icons on very light accent colours).

🎙️ Transcription & AI …

Per-language tables of adjacent word pairs, used by the keyboard for two things: re-ranking a correction by the word before it, and — together with the trigram tables — suggesting the next word.

Format w1 w2<TAB>count, lowercased, UTF-8, sorted by key. The app holds these as a flat blob it binary-searches, so key order lets it load the file with a linear scan instead of sorting 150 000 keys on first use of every language. To read them by frequency instead: sort -t$'\t' -k2 -rn <file>.

Two generations live here.

• <lang>_bigrams_150k.txt — current, 150 000 pairs, counted from the corpus sentences (issue #334).
• <lang>_bigrams.txt — superseded, 60 000 pairs, built from Leipzig's pre-computed co_n.txt.

The old files stay because devices running an older app version still ask for them by that name and verify them against the byte size baked into that version. A regenerated table therefore gets a new file name rather than replacing an asset in place — overwriting one would make those devices download it, fail the size check, discard it, and try again on every language switch.

Source Leipzig Corpora Collection (https://wortschatz-leipzig.de), CC BY — © Universität Leipzig / Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften / InfAI. Please cite D. Goldhahn, T. Eckart & U. Quasthoff (2012), "Building Large Monolingual Dictionaries at the Leipzig Corpora Collection: From 100 to 200 Languages", LREC 2012. …

Per-language glide-typing word dictionaries (issue #127), downloaded on demand by the keyboard.

Sources / attribution

• Word frequencies: OPUS — OpenSubtitles (https://opus.nlpl.eu).
• Casing & spell-filter (build-time only): Hunspell + wooorm/dictionaries (https://github.com/wooorm/dictionaries), each dictionary under its own licence. he and is are built OPUS-only (their Hunspell dictionaries are AGPL / CC-BY-SA).
• Details: tools/glide-dict/ATTRIBUTION.md.

English and German ship bundled in the app; every other language downloads from here. Build tooling: tools/glide-dict/.

Wear OS-only re-release fixing the Google Play "Watch shapes" rejection of 4.3.0-w1 (version code 100124). The phone app is unchanged and stays on 4.3.0 (123).

What changed (Wear OS)

• Round-display layout fix — the numbers keypad and the emoji grid filled the full rectangular width, so on circular watches their corner cells (keys 1/3/⌫/⏎ and the outer emoji columns) were clipped by the edge. Page content is now inset by the BoxInset factor (≈14.6% of the screen) so it fits inside the circle's inscribed square — nothing is cut off. Square watches are unaffected.

Verified on a round 454×454 Wear OS emulator.

Availability

Install from Google Play once the Wear OS track update is live.

Version: 4.3.0-w2 · versionCode 100125 (Wear band).

Wear OS-only re-release that fixes the Google Play review rejection of 4.3.0 (version code 100123). The phone app is unchanged and stays on 4.3.0 (123).

What changed (Wear OS)

• Functional dictation, demonstrable in-app — a new Try dictation button on the watch settings screen records → transcribes → shows the transcript right there, so dictation works without first enabling the keyboard.
• Keyboard onboarding — detects whether the Dictate keyboard is enabled/selected, with shortcuts to enable it and pick it (Dictate is an input method).
• Scrollbar — the settings list now shows the Wear scroll/position indicator.
• Full localization — all watch strings translated into the 20 maintained languages, kept short for the small screen.
• Version footer — shows Wear OS · v4.3.0-w1 (100124), explicitly Wear-labelled.

Availability

Install from Google Play once the Wear OS track update is live.

Version: 4.3.0-w1 · versionCode 100124 (Wear band).

📴 On-device transcription (offline)

Dictate completely offline — no internet needed and nothing ever leaves your phone.

• Download an on-device speech model once, then transcribe locally
• Great for privacy, flights, and spotty connections

Set it up under Settings ▸ Dictate ▸ Providers.

⌚ Wear OS keyboard

Dictate straight from your watch — tethered through your phone or fully standalone.

• Voice-first input with number and emoji pages
• Auto-syncs your settings from the phone; optional on-watch auto-rewording
• Live waveform, swipe-down to close

🔁 Find & replace rules

Automatically fix recurring words, names or phrases in every transcript. Set them up under Settings ▸ Dictate ▸ Custom mappings.

⚡ Single-call mode

Let one audio-capable AI model transcribe and format in a single request — lower latency and often lower cost. Toggle it per provider.

Other improvements

• New Smartbar actions to switch back to your previous keyboard or open the system keyboard picker ⌨️
• The keyboard's accent color now follows the color you pick under Settings ▸ Theme 🎨
• Optional undo button on the floating dictation button ↩️
• Various fixes and stability improvements 🛠️

Full changelog: https://github.com/DevEmperor/DictateKeyboard/compare/v4.2.0...v4.3.0

✨ Floating dictation button

Dictate straight into any app — even when another keyboard is active.

• Three styles: Pill, Ring, Orb · live waveform while you speak
• Drag anywhere with edge-snapping, custom color & size
• Long-press to reword

Enable under Settings ▸ Dictate ▸ Floating button.

🤖 Google Gemini

Bring your own AI Studio API key and use Gemini for both transcription and rewording.

🎙️ Whisper — and it still hears you

You can literally whisper and the AI still transcribes you accurately.

Other improvements

• Prompts now appear in an always-on row above the keys by default.
• More reliable cross-app text insertion (browsers, other keyboards).
• Instant recording and interrupted-recording recovery are now mutually exclusive (with a one-time explainer).

Full changelog: https://github.com/DevEmperor/DictateKeyboard/compare/v4.1.1...v4.2.0