Picture a Tuesday evening. You are stirring a pan of something with one hand and holding a toddler on your hip with the other. Your phone buzzes. It is the school, asking you to confirm pick-up arrangements by seven. Your hands are, quite literally, full.
Or picture a different morning. Your knuckles are stiff, as they often are before the day warms them up, and the thought of pecking out a reply to your sister on a tiny keyboard is enough to make you put it off until later. Later turns into tomorrow.
Phones assume we always have two free, nimble hands and fresh eyes. Real life rarely agrees. PeekoType for Android includes a handful of features designed for exactly these moments, and together they make your phone feel a great deal kinder to use.
The short version: the floating microphone lets you dictate into any app without switching keyboards. Read aloud speaks your writing back in a natural British English voice, generated on the phone with no internet needed. Custom vocabulary learns your names and jargon. And if you want words to appear as you speak, optional live typing and AI cleanup work with your own OpenAI key. All of it comes with the one-off £4.99 unlock.
The floating microphone: dictate from anywhere
The PeekoType keyboard already lets you speak into any app. The floating microphone goes one step further. It is a small round button that sits on top of whatever you are doing, so you can start dictating without first switching keyboards.
Drag it to wherever feels natural for your hand, perhaps low on the right for a thumb, or up high if you hold the phone in a stand. It remembers where you left it. Tap it, speak, and your words go straight into the box you are writing in.
It sounds like a small thing. In practice it removes the last bit of fiddling between you and a finished message, and that is often the difference between replying now and replying never.
When you switch it on, Android asks you to let PeekoType "display over other apps". We want to be clear about what that means: it lets the button be drawn on top of the screen, and that is all. It cannot read, record or capture anything underneath. The keyboard works perfectly well without it if you would rather not use it. Our privacy policy sets out every permission in plain English.
A real help for sore hands, stiff joints and one-handed days
For lots of people, voice typing is not a gadget. It is what makes a phone usable at all.
- Arthritis. Pinching and tapping small targets can be painful, especially first thing in the morning. Versus Arthritis has excellent advice on living well with joint pain, and speaking instead of typing takes a lot of pressure off small joints.
- RSI and wrist pain. If you already spend your working day on a keyboard, your phone should not add to the strain. The NHS guidance on RSI is worth a read, and we have shared our own experience in my wrists were killing me.
- Tremors and reduced dexterity. A single large button you can place wherever suits you is far easier than aiming for individual letters.
- A broken wrist, a cast or a sling. Temporary, but maddening, and suddenly one-handed phone use is your whole life for six weeks.
- Busy parents and carers. When you are holding a baby, a lead or a mobility aid, one tap and your voice does the rest.
If you would like to go fully hands-free on your computer as well, our complete guide to hands-free typing on Windows covers the desktop side. And for older relatives who find smartphones fiddly, voice typing for seniors and older adults is a gentle place to start.
A quick but important note: PeekoType is not a medical device. If you are living with pain, please do talk to your GP or a physiotherapist too.
Read aloud: hear your words before you hit send
Tap the speaker button and PeekoType reads out whatever is in the box you are writing in, or just the part you have highlighted, in a natural, warm British English voice.
The voice is created on your phone rather than streamed from a server. You download it once, a small file, and after that it works anywhere with no connection at all. Nothing you have read aloud ever leaves the device. While it is speaking, a notification appears with a Stop button, so you can always silence it in a hurry, say on a quiet train carriage.
People use it for all sorts of reasons:
- Proofreading before you send. Your eyes skim over mistakes your ears catch instantly. Hearing that important email read back is the quickest way to spot the missing word or the sentence that went on far too long. We explain why in hear it back: proofreading by ear.
- Dyslexia. Many dyslexic readers find that hearing text alongside reading it makes it easier to follow and less tiring. The British Dyslexia Association has lots of practical guidance, and our article on voice typing for dyslexia, ADHD and neurodiverse writers shows how to combine speaking to write with listening to read.
- Low vision or tired eyes. At the end of a long day, or for anyone with sight loss, listening is simply more comfortable. RNIB is a brilliant source of support if your sight is changing.
The voice is built on open, well-respected projects: Piper for the voice itself and sherpa-onnx to run it on your phone.
Custom vocabulary: get the names right first time
Nothing takes the shine off voice typing like watching it mangle your best friend's name for the fifth time. Custom vocabulary lets you add the words that matter to you, whether that is Niamh and Tadhg, the street you live on in Llanelli, your football club, or the medication names you type every week.
Add the spelling you want to see, keep the list focused on words you really use, and PeekoType will lean towards them when it hears you. Our full guide to custom vocabulary for voice typing has tips on what to add.
Live typing and AI cleanup: for when you want it instant
By default, PeekoType listens while you speak and then types your words when you stop. It is fast, private and entirely on your phone.
Some people love to see the words appear as they talk, the way a live caption does. That is what live typing is for. And AI cleanup goes back over your finished text to tidy up the punctuation and spelling, which is handy for longer messages and emails.
Both are optional and switched off when you install the app. They work with an OpenAI key that you create yourself, and OpenAI bills you directly for what you use, which for everyday messages is typically a matter of pennies. We take nothing from it, we never see your key, and nothing passes through our servers. If you prefer another compatible provider, you can point the app at that instead.
We are upfront about the trade-off: while these features are on, your speech or text is sent to OpenAI to be processed. The keyboard shows "Cloud" whenever that is the case, so you always know. Switch them off and everything goes back to staying on your phone. The detail is in our terms and privacy policy.
A day with a gentler phone
Here is how it tends to fit together once it becomes second nature.
On the walk to the station you tap the floating microphone and dictate a reply to the group chat about Saturday. On the train, with no signal in the cutting, you draft a tricky email to your manager, then have it read aloud with earphones in and catch the sentence that sounded sharper than you meant. At lunch you record a quick voice memo about a project idea and, later, turn it into text with on-phone transcription. In the evening, pan in one hand, you confirm the school pick-up without putting the spoon down.
None of it is dramatic. It just takes the friction out of dozens of little moments, and that adds up to a calmer day.
What it costs
The PeekoType keyboard, with offline dictation in around 100 languages, is free for good. Everything in this article, the floating microphone, read aloud, custom vocabulary, live typing and AI cleanup, comes with a single £4.99 payment, alongside transcribing recordings and the more accurate Small model. There is no subscription, for the reasons we set out in buy once, own forever.
New to PeekoType on your phone? Start with offline voice typing on Android, which walks through setup in about five minutes. You will find every setting explained in the user guide, too.