Voice Keyboard: Speech to Text

Sotto is a 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, Mail, a search box, someone's badly built web form.

Transcription happens on the phone, using Apple's on-device speech recognition. Nothing gets uploaded. There is no server to upload it to. It works in airplane mode.

Otherwise it is a plain keyboard. Letters, numbers, symbols, shift, backspace, return. The mic is one more key, not a mode you have to go somewhere else to turn on.

The setup has one odd wrinkle. iOS will not let a keyboard extension open the microphone, so the Sotto app listens and puts the transcript in a container shared with the keyboard. Start a Voice Session in the app once, then go type wherever you want. On the default setting it stays open until you end it. Most of the time you start it and forget it's there. Recording begins only after you tap the mic.

To set it up: add Sotto under Settings, General, Keyboard, then turn on Full Access. In this keyboard, Full Access is used to read the transcript from that shared container. Network permission never appears because Sotto doesn't request it.

Dictation runs in over 60 languages: Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and the rest of Apple's list. Pick yours in Settings. There's also a switch that drops the "um" and "uh" before the text gets typed. The keys use a Latin QWERTY layout. If a language needs its own script, Sotto does the talking and you switch keyboards to type.

Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/