This is a bit of a gimmick, but it’s also kind of cool. I didn’t type a word of what you are about to read. I dictated everything in this text into Wispr Flow, a cool dictation keyboard I have been trying for a few weeks. Here’s how it did: warts and all, with no hand-made corrections.
When Whisper contacted me to pitch their Speech-to-Text AI keyboard, I was a bit skeptical. Even Apple has tried to deliver a native dictation punctuation feature, but it’s proven quite hit or miss.
It also didn’t help that at first, the workflow to actually use the keyboard seemed a little fiddly. But as it turns out, what they did to get around iOS limitations and offer the closest thing currently possible to an AI-based transcription keyboard is pretty clever.
How it works.
Wispr Flow works based on what they call Flow Sessions, which are windows of time you let the app access the microphone. In settings, you can configure the app to automatically end Flow Sessions immediately after 5 minutes, after 15 minutes, after 1 hour, or never.
Once you tap Start Flow from the app’s third-party keyboard, it takes you to the full-blown Wispr Flow app, activates the Flow Session, and then hops you back to where you were. From then on, you can tap the microphone button and it’ll start capturing what you’re saying. When you’re done, tap the check mark button and end the transcription session. You can also tap the menu button on the left to manually turn off the flow session.
Inside the app, you’ll find:
– Your entire dictation history
– A quick notes feature
– A tab to create a custom dictionary of specific words that you want the app to learn how to write and replace in the dictation sessions
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