Speaking Of

Speaking Of… is a mini keyboard. One slim row, tab, space, delete, return, instead of fifty letters and a third of your screen. What's left is your text, with room to read it. It's especially good while you're dictating. The keys your thumb actually wants are right there, and for once you can see the whole thing you just said. AN AMAZING VIEW OF WHAT YOU JUST SAID The standard keyboard takes about a third of your display. This one takes a twelfth. That's roughly nine more lines of your own words on screen: enough to read the whole message while you're still talking, instead of proofreading it through a letterbox. TALK AND TAP AT THE SAME TIME Dictation will type a new line if you ask it to. But asking means stopping: dropping out of the sentence you're saying, switching into giving a command, and hoping it hears an instruction instead of words. Your thumb interrupts nothing. Fill in a form and you'll feel it immediately: talk, tab, talk, tab, straight down the page without a single pause. Your voice keeps saying the thing while your hand keeps moving between the fields. Two channels running at once, instead of one channel taking turns with itself. DICTATION, EXACTLY AS YOU ALREADY DO IT Nothing here replaces dictation or reroutes it. Apple's microphone sits in the row directly below our keys, where it has always been. Tap it, talk, and the words land in whatever app you're in. There is nothing new to learn. THE RIGHT SIZE FOR WHAT YOU'RE DOING There's nothing wrong with the standard keyboard. When you're typing letters, it's exactly the right tool and exactly the right size. It's only the wrong size when you're not typing. So keep both. One tap of the globe key switches between them, instantly. Apple's for typing, ours for talking. You aren't giving anything up to try this. FIX IT WITH YOUR THUMB Dictation gets a word wrong now and then, so the keys are built around repair. Hold the space bar and slide to walk the cursor; push to the end and hold, and it flies across a paragraph. Hold delete and it picks up speed. Swipe left across delete and it takes whole words, because dictation doesn't misspell, it mishears. MAKE IT YOURS Eight colors, each mixed twice so it looks right in daylight and at night. Dress the tab, delete and return keys however you like; the space bar stays classic. Match the app icon to your colors. Turn on the little tap under your thumb that makes a key feel like a key. IT CANNOT HEAR YOU iOS never gives a keyboard access to the microphone, and we don't go looking for a way around it. There's no networking code in this app at all, so nothing can leave your phone even by accident. No account, no analytics, no ads, nothing collected, nothing to opt out of. It's buttons. That's the whole app.