The iPhone keyboard

A full keyboard behind the Talk button: suggestions, autocorrect in 33 languages, curly quotes, accents, numbers, and taps that learn your aim.

iPhone only.

Talk or letters

The Scribe keyboard opens on the Talk layer. Tap ABC for the letter keyboard; the Scribe key brings you back. If you type more than you dictate, set Settings › Keyboard › Opens with to Letters and Scribe becomes your everyday keyboard with a Talk key one tap away.

The letter layer is laid out like Apple’s: the same rows and key sizes, Shift and caps lock, 123 for numbers and #+= for symbols, a globe key when iOS needs one, and Return.

Suggestions and autocorrect

The suggestion bar shows three candidates drawn from the system dictionary, your Dictionary, remembered keyboard words and your text replacements. When the middle suggestion is about to replace what you typed, the left slot shows your word in quotes; tap it to keep your spelling.

Autocorrect follows your enabled languages and applies when you type a space or punctuation. Tap Delete straight after a correction to put your word back. Correct the same word twice and the keyboard remembers it; see Auto-learning.

Autocorrect and suggestions work in 33 languages: Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Bosnian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish and Vietnamese.

Quotes and punctuation

Apostrophes and quotation marks come out curly, in the style of the language you are typing: “ ” in English, „ “ in German, « » with narrow spaces in French. Two hyphens become a dash; a double space ends the sentence with a full stop. The Code Refine tone keeps straight quotes in dictated code; it does not change what you type.

Accents and alternates

Long-press a letter for its accents and alternates, chosen for your enabled languages. Long-press a top-row letter to type the digit shown on it when hints are on.

Numbers

Settings › Keyboard › Numbers has three settings:

Off: numbers live on the 123 layer.
Hints: small digits appear on the top row of letters; long-press to type one.
Row: a full row of number keys above the letters.

Taps that learn your aim

Where a tap lands is scored against the nearest keys and the words of your language, so an off-centre tap still produces the word you meant. Over time the keyboard learns where you actually tap each key and shifts its centre, by at most a quarter of the key, to match.

Choose Settings › Keyboard › Reset typing learning to clear the learned offsets and the remembered keyboard words and start from the default layout.

Delete and the space bar

Hold Delete to repeat; keep holding to delete words. Swipe left from Delete to delete whole words; the keyboard says how many.
Long-press Delete and tap Undo to put back what you just removed.
Press and hold the space bar to move the cursor like a trackpad.

Settings › Keyboard

Setting	What it does
Opens with	Talk or Letters as the layer shown first.
Suggestions	The suggestion bar. Refine presets still appear when text is selected.
Numbers	Off, Hints or Row.
Swipe to type	Turn swipe typing on or off.
Keep mic ready for	Off, 1, 5 or 15 minutes after a dictation.
Lower other audio while I talk	Ducks music and video while you dictate.
Reset typing learning	Clears learned key positions and keyboard words.

Full Access lets the keyboard exchange text and settings with the Scribe app on the same phone. It makes no network requests.

Common problems

Letters are missing when I type fast. Tell us the iPhone model at support@nanthai.tech. The typing layer has been tuned against the system keyboard; this should not happen.

A word keeps being corrected to something else. Tap the left suggestion to keep your spelling; after two keeps the keyboard stops correcting it. Or add the word to your Dictionary.

Chinese, Japanese or Korean. The Scribe keyboard has no input method for these scripts. Use Apple’s keyboards for typing them, via the globe key. Dictation depends on what Apple’s speech offers on your device.