Sotto: Voice Typing Keyboard

arephan

In-app purchases

About this app

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, Gmail, a search box, someone's badly built web form.

The transcription 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.

The part I do control: there is no Sotto account, no Sotto server, no analytics in the app. Nothing goes anywhere I can read it. The network permission in the listing comes from Google's billing library, which is what runs the subscription.

Otherwise it's a plain keyboard — letters, numbers, symbols, shift, backspace, return. The mic is one more key, not a mode you turn on somewhere else.

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.

Two things worth knowing before you install. Dictation is US English in this version. And there's a toggle that strips the "um" and "uh" out before the words get typed, which I left on by default.

What’s new

We took out a line that said your voice never leaves the phone. That was wrong on Android 12 and older, where Android's built-in speech service can send audio to Google.