Download for Windows

Getting started

Getting started: your first dictation

VoiceKeyboard types what you say into the window where your cursor is. This page covers what the app needs and the first dictation, step by step.

What you need

  • Windows 10 or 11 and a microphone.
  • An internet connection for the online engines, Soniox and Google. The Google engine also needs Google Chrome installed on the computer, because it listens through Chrome.
  • For dictation without the internet, one offline model. You download it inside the app the first time you choose it.

An NVIDIA graphics card is optional. It only matters for Whisper, which runs much faster on one.

Free and Pro are the same program. Pro is switched on later with a licence code, so there is nothing else to download.

What you see on first launch

The window looks like a tube amplifier. Three buttons at the top switch its screens:

  • LIVE is dictation: the microphone (INPUT), the POWER tube, the RECOGNITION panel where you pick the engine and language, and the screens that show the text.
  • FILES turns audio and video files, or video links, into text.
  • SETUP holds the settings.

VoiceKeyboard also puts an icon in the Windows tray. MINIMIZE hides the window there; EXIT closes the app. It starts with Windows by default, and you can turn that off in SETUP.

The menus and messages appear in your Windows language if it is English, Spanish, Russian, Japanese or Hindi, and in English otherwise. The engraved panel labels (POWER, INPUT, RECOGNITION and so on) stay in English in every language.

Your first dictation

  1. On the RECOGNITION panel, look at the LANGUAGES row. The lit key is the language the engine will listen for. Press the key of the language you are about to speak.
  2. Click into the place where the text should go: an email, a chat, a document, a code editor.
  3. Press Ctrl+1. You hear a click and the POWER tube lights up.
  4. Speak normally.
  5. Press Ctrl+1 again to stop, or simply go quiet: after a few seconds of silence the recording stops by itself.

On a new install the ONLINE side runs Google, which is free. With the Google engine, wait for the quiet tick after the click before you start talking: it needs about a second to begin listening. The other engines hear you from the first moment.

If you already started it

Only one copy runs at a time. Starting it again shows "VoiceKeyboard is already running (possibly minimized to the tray)." Click the tray icon to bring the window back.

Next steps