Dictate 6.1.0

Dictate 6.1.0 is a release about the things you do around dictating. Point the keyboard at a folder and it becomes a sticker panel. Share a voice message to Dictate and it tells you what it says — no field to find, no button to press. And the autocorrect finally catches the ordinary typo, the one it was built not to see. Updating shows a new What's-new tour for 6.1; every tour stays re-viewable under Settings › About.

🖼️ Your own stickers (#280)

• Point Dictate at a folder and its pictures become stickers. Subfolders turn into tabs, each with its own favourites and recents. No account, no catalogue, no upload — the folder is the feature.
• Add one from any app through the share sheet, and delete one without leaving the keyboard.
• What a chat app accepts is not what it says it accepts. WhatsApp asks for image/webp.wasticker and never plain image/webp, then validates what arrives under that name and answers an oversized sticker with an empty frame; Signal takes an animated WebP and shows a single frame of it. So each sticker is brought into one shape — 512×512 WebP within budget — once, on the way into the folder, and inserting is a lookup and a commit.
• Two derivatives cover the rest: a PNG for an app without WebP, and a GIF, written by hand because Android cannot encode one, for an app that would otherwise freeze the animation.

🎧 Share a voice message to Dictate (#301, from #300)

• Dictate is now in the share sheet for audio and video, with Open with from a file manager as well. Share a voice message and a screen opens that starts transcribing by itself: sharing a file to a transcriber has already said what should happen to it, and a second button would be a toll on a decision made twice.
• File transcription has existed since 4.0.0, but only ever answered one of the two questions people have about an audio file. Long-press the mic and the text lands at the cursor — put this file's words into the field I am typing in. What someone actually does with a voice message is the reverse.
• Long recordings are handled in pieces rather than turned away, the transcript is searchable, and the player has fixed ends and a real position.
• One entry per file, on a screen you can come back to.

✍️ Autocorrect (#295, #150)

• The typo it was built not to see is fixed. The rule deciding whether a correction could be swapped in silently let through a finger that had slid 90% of the way to the next key — but never one that landed on the neighbour squarely, and never a word with two slips at all. That is the ordinary typo, and it now gets corrected.
• How eagerly it corrects is a setting, measured against two populations rather than one: how many real slips get fixed, and how many correctly typed words get damaged. Both numbers are in the repository as a test that stays.
• The word space is about to take is marked, in your accent colour, in every bundled theme. It had been handing the strip an "auto-commit" attribute since #150 that no stylesheet ever read.
• Backspace right after a correction gives back what you typed, the way Gboard and SwiftKey do.

👤 Contacts, without the address book (#264, #263)

• Your contacts' names can go into the personal dictionary, so the keyboard stops underlining them and starts suggesting them — through a picker, or by importing a vCard.
• It never asks for READ_CONTACTS. You hand over the names you want; nothing else is read.
• A word you added now competes for the strip instead of owning it. With a handful of hand-added words the old behaviour was invisible; after importing a contact list it is not.

🎙️ Dictation providers

• Gemini transcribes with models built for it. (#292) Google shipped gemini-3.5-transcribe and gemini-3.5-transcribe-live on 26 August; until now Gemini transcribed with its multimodal chat models under a stern instruction to return the words and nothing else, and streaming was off altogether.
• Deepgram Flux, live. (#291) Flux decides for itself when a turn has ended instead of waiting out a silence timer. It is streaming-only and lives on a different API version, reporting turn events rather than results — so picking it used to fail either way round.
• Say which languages you speak, not just one. (#99, #248) An expected-languages list for the models that accept one, and free detection no longer turns into a failed dictation over a region tag.
• A model that only thought gets asked again, with the thinking turned down. (#304) A rewording that came back empty because the budget went entirely on reasoning used to replace a dictation with nothing.
• A failed dictation says which half failed. (#284) A rewording that died reported "unknown error during transcription", and on the normal path said nothing at all — the raw transcript appeared and the rewording was silently gone.

⌨️ Typing & layouts

• Russian can be typed phonetically (#302) — a ЯШЕРТЫ layout beside ЙЦУКЕН.
• French finds its accents from the plain letters (#306) — ho reaches hôte and hôtel, oeu reaches œuvre, and an unaccented spelling still gets its accent restored.
• Prompts can be triggered by typing a shortcut (#283), not only by tapping one in the strip.
• The suggestions switch really switches suggestions off (#297) — a disabled child preference kept running underneath it. And an app can no longer switch your suggestions off without you (#296): the flag that asks for it used to kill completion and autocorrect outright. Password fields are still refused, in code.
• Emoji suggestions are no longer switched off by something else. (#298)
• A deleted community prompt can be added back. (#303) The library reported prompts as already added that existed nowhere.

🔧 Fixed

• Very wide screens get a keyboard again. (#114) In a window 1600dp or wider — a 14.6" tablet in landscape, DeX, a desktop-sized window — the baseline every keyboard dimension is a fraction of was 0 × 0, so the window collapsed to nothing.
• Autofill chips no longer take the keyboard down with them. (#287)
• Rotating the screen no longer throws away a floating-button recording. (#293) The keyboard now ends only the dictations it owns.
• An error's details can be read without the keyboard ducking out from under it. A focusable popup raised by an input method takes focus off the field, so the system hides the keyboard — which tears down the popup, which brings the keyboard back.
• The strips above the keys keep their own scrolling. (#188, #221, #290)
• A transcript with no words in it no longer gets a conversational reply instead of a result. (#124)