A voice keyboard for iPhone. Tap ƒ and talk. Your words appear as you say them and land in whatever you were already writing, transcribed on your device.
Free during beta · iPhone 11 or later, iOS 26+
Your keyboard is the bottleneck between what's in your head and what actually gets written. Here's what that's costing you.
The idea in the shower. The perfect line for that email, mid-commute. The thing you swore you'd remember. Fleeting thoughts have a ten-second shelf life, and typing takes longer than that. Speak it the moment it arrives, before it's gone for good.
The lead who inquired five minutes ago. The friend still waiting on yesterday's text. The reply you drafted in your head and never sent. When responding takes four minutes of thumb-typing, "later" wins. And later never comes. With your voice, the full answer takes twenty seconds. Send it now, while it still matters.
Walking the dog. Making dinner. Between sets, between meetings, halfway out the door. Typing is the one thing you can't do while doing anything else. Speaking isn't. Get it written without stopping, without looking down, without losing your place in your own life.
Stop working at your slowest speed.
Forte transcribes on the device in your hand, by default: no round trip, no audience. Whatever Forte keeps, it keeps there, and you decide what it keeps. Read the privacy policy →
Forte's speech engine runs on your iPhone's Neural Engine, via Core ML. Your audio becomes text where you spoke it. Once the engine is downloaded it keeps working in airplane mode, which is the simplest way to see where the work happens.
No analytics, no tracking, no advertising identifier, no telemetry about what you write. Forte's App Store privacy label reads “Data Not Collected”.
Your history, your vocabulary, your stats: all of it lives in Forte's own storage on your device. Delete a dictation and it's gone. Delete Forte and all of it goes. Nothing in Forte is on that you didn't turn on.
On the Forte keyboard, in any app. The mic arms and you're bounced right back to where you were typing.
Speak the way you'd speak to a person. The words appear on the keyboard as you say them. Say the punctuation when you want it exactly: “new paragraph”, “question mark”.
Your words land where the cursor was, spaced and capitalized like you typed them yourself. A Live Activity keeps an End button on the lock screen the whole time the mic is armed.
Forte is one globe tap away in every app that takes a keyboard. Tap ƒ, talk, tap ✓. You never left the message, the doc, or the search box you were in.
Map it once and typing with your voice is a squeeze away from anywhere: the home screen, someone else's app, mid-sentence. Forte never comes to the front. It doesn't even have to be running.
While the mic is on, the Dynamic Island shows your voice moving, and an End button sits on the lock screen, so there is no unlocking to stop. Go quiet for a while and the session winds down on its own; the timeout is yours to set.
Your words appear on the keyboard while you're still talking, about half a second behind your voice. The newest few shimmer until Forte is sure of them, then the finished text drops into your app.
Filler comes out. Spoken numbers land as digits, “eleven thirty” becomes 11:30, and a long thought arrives as paragraphs instead of a wall. Say “question mark” and you get one; say “trial period” and Forte knows you didn't.
Dictate into the middle of a sentence and the words splice in clean: no stray capital, no period where one doesn't belong. Talk into a search box or an address bar and it stays a search box.
Teach Forte your names and jargon: highlight a word in any app, tap once. Every entry also fixes its sound-alike misspellings automatically, right after transcription. Your own word swaps live there too.
Highlight a word that came out wrong and the keyboard offers corrections, your vocabulary's spellings ranked first. Or select the phrase and say the right one. Your voice replaces the selection.
Space-bar trackpad with acceleration, word-by-word cursor hops, word delete, quick settings. Dictation-first doesn't mean editing-last.
Pick the languages you actually speak. Forte quietly routes to the engine that serves your mix. You never pick one, or even see its name. English ships unbadged; the rest wear an honest ALPHA or EXPERIMENTAL.
Forte checks every transcription against the clock and re-listens to any stretch that came back empty, so a long thought can't lose its middle. Every dictation stays in History, searchable, and the last ten are one tap away on the keyboard.
Forte counts what speaking buys back, measured against typing the same words at 38 WPM (the mobile average), plus your pace by hour, your streak, and your records. Counted on your phone, for your eyes only.
No, but you'll stop reaching for it. Forte sits alongside your usual keyboard, one globe tap away, always there when you want it. How much faster is talking? You don't have to take our word for it: Forte times your actual speaking pace against typing the same words at 38 WPM (the mobile average), so the number on your Stats screen is yours, not a slogan. Within a day or two Forte is where you write anything longer than a word, and the old keyboard becomes the place you pop over to for a quick fix.
There is, and it's how you know that dictation and writing aren't the same thing. Forte is built for the second one. Your words appear as you speak so you can watch the sentence form. Filler comes out, numbers and times and punctuation land in the shape you'd have typed them, and your names are spelled your way because you taught them once. The text splices into the middle of a paragraph without a stray capital, and it's still in History a week later when you want it again. Turning sound into characters is the easy part.
iOS keyboards can't use the microphone, so the Forte keyboard hands the recording job to the Forte app and gets your transcript back, a handoff that happens entirely on your phone, through storage only those two share. Full Access is what iOS calls permission for the two to talk. iOS shows the same warning to every full-access keyboard; the Forte keyboard contains no networking code at all, and the privacy policy puts that in writing.
iPhone 11 and later (SE 2nd generation included) on iOS 26, the floor where on-device transcription gets fast enough to feel instant.
Thirty-six, and Forte tells you the truth about each one. English is the language we stand behind without an asterisk: it's what the whole polish layer is tuned for. Twenty-four more are marked ALPHA: recognition is strong, but the writing polish is still English-first. Eleven are marked EXPERIMENTAL: recognizable, and nothing beyond that has been checked yet. The badges are a ladder, not an apology. A language only moves up when we have actually done the work, so if one is still marked ALPHA it is because we have not tuned the writing for it yet, and we would rather say so than let you find out. You pick the ones you actually speak and Forte routes to the right engine on its own. Two things worth knowing before you tick every box: the fewer languages you select, the more specialized the engine Forte can use, so accuracy goes up. And a dictation is in one language at a time. Forte won't follow you from one to another mid-sentence.
Yes. Forte downloads a speech engine once during setup. It happens in the background while you do something else. After that, transcribing on your device needs no connection at all. Airplane mode is a demo of how Forte works, not a failure mode. (Select languages beyond English and Forte may fetch a broader engine to cover them; that's still a one-time download.)
It stays with you. Every dictation lands in History on your device, searchable, so the paragraph you spoke last Tuesday is findable. The last ten sit one tap away on the keyboard, for the times an app swallows an insert. Delete a dictation and it's deleted. Delete Forte and all of it goes with it.
The beta is free. When Forte ships it'll be free to download and free to use for a week, so you can decide with your own words, in your own apps. After that the keyboard is a one-time purchase: buy it once, it's yours, updates included, no expiry and no account. If we later build power tools on top of it, those will be sold separately and clearly marked, some as a subscription. Nothing you bought stops working because you didn't buy something else.
Forte is in a small private beta on TestFlight. Leave your name and email and we'll send invites in waves as seats open. Every tester gets a person, not a pipeline.
Seats are capped while we read every piece of feedback.