Voice to Text Keyboard - Sotto

Sotto is a voice typing keyboard: a plain keyboard with a mic key on it. Tap the key, say what you meant to type, tap it again. The text lands wherever you were already typing. Messages, Gmail, a search box, someone's badly built web form.

The speech to text runs through Android's own speech engine, and Sotto asks for the on-device one first. On an Android 13 or newer phone with the offline language pack installed, the words are worked out on the handset and the mic key still does its job in airplane mode. On older phones Android hands the audio to Google's recognizer instead, the same one the stock keyboard has always used. So offline is worth checking on your own phone rather than taking as a promise I can make about every phone.

What I can tell you for sure: there's no Sotto account and no Sotto server, and the keyboard itself never sends anything. What you type or say doesn't go anywhere I can read it. The Sotto settings app does send a few anonymous events (which screen opened, which setting got flipped, how a purchase went) so I can see when something breaks. The network permission is for that and for Google's billing library, which runs the subscription.

Otherwise it's a plain keyboard with letters, numbers, symbols, shift, backspace and return. The mic is just one more key.

The letters are free for good. Dictation is free for the first week; after that it needs a subscription, and Play opens that with another free week before anything is charged. Cancel it and the typing half carries on.

Setup lives in Settings: switch Sotto on under on-screen keyboards, pick it, then allow the microphone the first time you tap the key.

Dictation uses whatever language your phone is set to. There's also a toggle (on by default) that strips out the "um" and "uh" before the words get typed.

Recent changes:
Fixes an issue where the subscription screen sometimes showed "unavailable" on first open.