You are standing at a bus stop in the drizzle, one hand holding a bag of shopping, the other trying to reply to a message with a thumb that keeps hitting the wrong key. Autocorrect decides you meant "ducking". The bus arrives. You give up and send a thumbs up instead.
We have all been there. Phones are brilliant at almost everything except the one thing we do on them most: writing. So we have built something to help. PeekoType, the offline dictation app that Windows users already rely on, is now on Android, and it turns your voice into text in any app on your phone without sending a single word to the cloud.
The short version: PeekoType for Android is a voice keyboard. Enable it once, then tap the microphone in WhatsApp, Gmail, Notes or anywhere else you type, and speak. Your speech is turned into text on the phone itself, in around 100 languages, with no account and no signal needed. Dictation is free for good, and a single £4.99 payment unlocks the extras.
Why typing on a phone is harder than it should be
The average person speaks at roughly three times the speed they can type on a phone screen. That gap is the whole story. Every long message, every email reply you put off until you are back at your desk, every note you meant to jot down and then forgot, is a small tax on your day.
For some people it is more than a tax. If you have stiff or painful fingers, a tremor, dyslexia, or simply big thumbs and small keys, the phone keyboard can feel like it was designed to work against you. Talking is natural. Tapping out a paragraph on a sheet of glass is not.
Voice typing on Android is not new, of course. But a lot of voice keyboards lean on an internet connection, and it is not always obvious when your words are being sent off to a server to be processed. PeekoType takes a different route.
A keyboard, not another app to juggle
The clever part is that PeekoType on Android is a keyboard. It is not a separate app you dictate into and then copy and paste out of, which is fiddly and nobody sticks with it.
You switch it on once in your phone's settings. From then on, it sits wherever you type. Replying to the family group chat? Tap the microphone and speak. Writing an email to your landlord? Tap and speak. Searching for a recipe in your browser, adding to your shopping list, drafting a LinkedIn post, filling in a form: it is the same tap, the same voice, and the words land exactly where your cursor is.
If you already use PeekoType on your computer, it will feel instantly familiar. If you are new to the idea, our beginner's guide to voice typing explains the habits that make it click.
Offline really does mean offline
Speech is turned into text by the same Whisper speech recognition models that power the Windows app, running directly on your phone's processor. The speech model downloads once over Wi-Fi, and after that you never need a connection again.
That makes a surprising difference in everyday life:
- On the Tube, in a tunnel or on a train through the countryside, where signal comes and goes, it keeps working.
- On a plane in flight mode, you can draft every email you have been avoiding and send them when you land.
- Abroad, you are not burning through roaming data every time you dictate a message home.
- In rural black spots, the village hall or the back of a farmhouse, where one bar of signal is a good day, dictation is just as quick as it is at home.
And because nothing leaves the phone, what you say stays yours. We explain the technology in more depth in how offline speech recognition works.
Talk in punctuation, and fix mistakes by voice
Good dictation is not just about getting words on the screen. It is about getting readable words on the screen. PeekoType for Android understands the spoken commands that make the difference:
- Say "full stop", "comma" or "question mark" and the punctuation appears.
- Say "new paragraph" to start a fresh block of text.
- Say "scratch that" to remove what you just said, without reaching for the backspace key.
These commands are part of the free app, not an upsell. If you want to go further, our guides to voice commands for dictation and editing your dictation by voice cover the full set.
Around 100 languages, no extra downloads
The speech models understand around 100 languages. Whether you message your gran in Welsh, your colleagues in Polish or your friends in Punjabi, you pick the language and speak. For bilingual households and anyone who works across borders, this alone is worth the install. Our piece on multilingual voice typing has tips for switching between languages smoothly.
Tiny or Base: which speech model should you choose?
When you first open the app, it asks you to pick a speech model. Here is the simple version:
| Model | Size | Best for | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base | 60 MB | Almost everyone. Accurate, and fast enough on any modern phone. | Free |
| Tiny | 32 MB | Older handsets where Base feels a touch slow. | Free |
| Small | 190 MB | Transcribing longer recordings with the best offline accuracy. | £4.99 unlock |
If in doubt, choose Base. The same trade-offs apply on the desktop, as we explain in picking the speech model size that suits your device.
Private by design, and honest about it
When you enable any third-party keyboard, Android shows a warning that keyboards can collect what you type. It shows that same warning for every keyboard, so we would rather explain exactly what PeekoType does than hope you skip past it.
- There is no account, no sign-in and no telemetry.
- Your voice recording is held in memory only while you speak, turned into text and then thrown away. It is never saved to storage.
- To make "scratch that" work, the keyboard reads a small amount of text just before your cursor, at most a thousand characters, only at the moment you give the command.
- Your dictation history, if you keep it switched on, stays in the app's private storage and is never backed up to the cloud.
The full detail is in our privacy policy. If you want to know more about your rights over your own data in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office is a good place to start, and our article on GDPR-compliant voice typing explains why on-device processing makes compliance so much simpler.
Set it up in five minutes
You need Android 8.0 or later on a 64-bit phone, which covers nearly every phone sold in the last several years. The app is a 34 MB download.
- Download it from our Android page or from Google Play. They are the same app. If you download from our website, your browser will ask you to allow the install once. That is simply Android checking you meant to do it.
- Enable the PeekoType keyboard. The app opens on a short checklist and takes you straight to the right settings screen.
- Allow microphone access, so the microphone key can hear you.
- Choose a speech model. Base is the one to pick. It downloads once over Wi-Fi.
- Try it. The app gives you a box to dictate into so you can see it working before you rely on it.
After that, switch to the PeekoType keyboard in any app, tap the microphone, speak, and tap it again when you have finished. That is all there is to it. Every screen is covered in the PeekoType user guide.
What is free, and what the £4.99 unlock adds
We believe the core of voice typing should not sit behind a paywall, so dictation with the Tiny and Base models is free for good. No trial, no account, no daily limit, no nagging.
If you want more, a single payment of £4.99 unlocks everything else: the Small model, transcribing audio and video recordings, custom vocabulary for names and jargon, read aloud in a natural voice, a floating microphone that follows you between apps, and optional live typing and AI cleanup. It is one payment, not a subscription, for the same reasons we set out in buy once, own forever.
We have written up two of those extras in detail: transcribing voice memos and recordings on your phone, and hands-free texting, read aloud and live typing.
One small note: PeekoType for Android and PeekoType for Windows are separate products, bought separately, so a licence for one does not unlock the other.
Give your thumbs the day off
The best thing about voice typing on your phone is how quickly it stops feeling like a novelty. A few days in, you will find yourself replying to messages properly instead of with an emoji, capturing ideas on a walk before they vanish, and clearing emails on the train that used to wait until evening. It is a small change that quietly gives you back a lot of time.