v3.0

SonderKey 3.0

• The keyboard's top edge can now be shaped. Under Appearance → Sonder theme → Shape, choose flat, rounded, or inverted. Rounded curves the top two corners off. Inverted keeps the keyboard's own edge straight and instead fills up and around the corners of the app above it, so the app appears to have rounded bottom corners with the keyboard wrapping them. Flat remains the default, so nothing changes unless you pick otherwise.

• The background colour picker now does what it says. Every other colour in the Sonder theme was applied exactly as chosen, but the background was pushed to one end of the lightness scale and stripped of most of its colour, so every choice came out near-black or near-white with a tint too faint to see. It now uses the colour as picked, like the rest. Light surface options have been added to the presets, since the light and dark Sonder themes no longer force this colour either way.

• It is now obvious which colour you are editing. The selected channel carries an outline, a filled container and bolder text, rather than a tint that was easy to miss and left the swatches and sliders below looking unattached to anything.

• Dragging a colour slider no longer flickers the keyboard. Every change rebuilt the live keyboard immediately, which made sliders stutter and could bring the app down if it happened while the keyboard was busy handling a paste. Changes apply straight away; the rebuild now waits until they stop coming.

• Voice typing defaults to correcting as you speak. The transcription mode introduced in 2.7 now starts on "Keep correcting", which re-transcribes and refines the text every second. "At every pause" and "When you finish" remain available under Voice typing.

v2.7

SonderKey 2.7

• Voice typing can now write as you speak, and the keyboard stays usable while it listens. Previously nothing appeared until you tapped the microphone a second time. There are three choices under Voice typing, because the two live approaches trade off against each other rather than one simply being better:

  • When you finish — the previous behaviour, kept for anyone who prefers it.
  • At every pause — the recording is split where you pause for breath and each phrase is transcribed on its own while the microphone stays open. Text lands a phrase behind you, and a long dictation costs no more per phrase than a short one. This is the default.
  • Keep correcting — everything said so far is transcribed again every second and the text replaced, so later words can fix earlier ones. Each pass is longer than the last, so this slows down on a long dictation.

• The listening indicator no longer disappears part way through a dictation. Word suggestions appear as soon as text is inserted, and they were taking over the suggestion strip, leaving no sign that the microphone was still open. The strip now stays with voice typing until the turn ends.

v2.5.1

SonderKey 2.5.1

• Fixes the microphone key multiplying along the suggestion strip. Rebuilding the toolbar cleared two of its three containers but not the one the voice key sits in when it is placed on the left, which is the default — so each rebuild added another microphone instead of replacing it. Anything that reloads the keyboard several times over, installing dictionaries in particular, left a row of them behind. They only disappeared on a force stop, since reopening the keyboard reuses the existing strip.

v2.5

SonderKey 2.5

• Restoring a LeanType backup now brings back settings you never changed. A backup only stores settings you actually touched, so anything left at its default was missing from the file entirely and picked up SonderKey's default instead — which differs from LeanType's in sixteen places, among them key hints and narrow key gaps. Those now restore to the values the backup's own app used. Settings you did change were always restored and still take priority. Thanks to @cinnabar777 for the report.

• Toolbar keys you never had no longer appear after a restore. Handwriting is only offered on the standardfull build, so a backup from any other build has no entry for it and was being handed the key switched on — for a plugin that was never installed. Keys absent from a backup now stay off.

• Swipe down on the toolbar to hide the keyboard is now on by default. It was off, which meant most people never found it. Turn it off again under Toolbar if you'd rather not have it.

v2.4.5

SonderKey 2.4.5

• Fixes voice typing failing with "Failed to get field ID" on release builds. The speech library reads its configuration through JNI by field name, and release builds shrink the app by renaming and removing anything that looks unused — which those fields do, since nothing in Java or Kotlin reads them. They are now protected from that. Debug builds were unaffected, which is why this only appeared on the published APK.

v2.4.4

SonderKey 2.4.4

Releases now ship a single APK. standardfull is a superset of the other variants — everything they do, plus handwriting — so publishing four builds only made it harder to know which to download. The file is simply SonderKey_<version>.apk.

The other variants still build from source for anyone who wants them, including the offline ones with no internet permission at all.

Since 2.4.0

• Voice model downloads no longer fail with "No such file or directory". Both downloads were staged in the cache directory, which Android trims under pressure — taking the second file's destination with it mid-download.
• Voice typing reports why it produced no text, instead of every failure reading as "Nothing was heard".
• A speech engine that fails to load is no longer deleted, so a transient failure does not cost a full re-download.
• Check for updates in About: finds a newer release, downloads it, and hands it to the system installer.

v2.4.0

SonderKey 2.4.0

The first full release since 1.0.1, and a large one. Voice typing, a colour system of its own, and a long list of fixes to things inherited from upstream.

Voice typing

Speech to text that runs entirely on this device. Audio is never written to storage and never leaves the phone.

• A Voice typing screen downloads what it needs: a speech engine (~25 MB) and an English language model (~126 MB). Neither ships inside the app, so the download stays small for anyone who does not want this.
• The microphone key on the toolbar records instead of handing off to the system. Press once to start, press again to transcribe and insert. Recording stops on its own after a minute.
• While recording, the suggestion strip shows a Listening label and a level meter driven by your voice, so it is obvious the microphone is live.
• The key is pinned above the keyboard on the left by default; either end and either placement can be chosen.
• Built on sherpa-onnx (Apache-2.0) with NVIDIA's Parakeet TDT-CTC 110m. English only — speaking another language produces nonsense rather than an error, so the app now says so up front.

Sonder theme

• Four independent colours — keys, function keys, accent and background — each set directly, with presets, hue/saturation/brightness sliders, hex entry and a live keyboard preview.
• The rest of the palette is derived from them, with tones placed on the CIE L* curve so the ramp stays even whichever hue is chosen.
• The colours apply to the settings app as well as the keyboard, and update as you pick them.
• Sonder Dark is the default night theme.

Emoji

• The Emoji 17.0 set is available regardless of the device's Android version. A colour emoji font ships inside the app and is used to draw the palette.
• Seven emoji whose artwork no font can be relied on to draw are rendered from bundled images instead, so the palette never shows an empty box.
• The Override Emoji version ceiling was raised; it was capped below the emoji the app already contained.
• Emoji suggestions are off by default, and are never offered for gesture typing, where they displaced the word actually drawn.

Setup and libraries

• The setup wizard now offers the main dictionary, without which gesture typing runs and silently returns nothing, and can install voice typing and grant microphone access.
• Installing the gesture typing library no longer closes the app. It restarts properly and returns to the settings, and the library works immediately.
• English (United States) is the default language.
• The handwriting plugin download button is visible and reachable.

Appearance

• Settings use a grouped layout with rounded cards, labels above them, plain outline icons and roomier rows.
• The app icon is correctly centred at every size; the adaptive icon previously contained the whole plate, so launchers masked a square inside a squircle.

Fixes carried over

• Migration steps inherited from upstream no longer re-run on every update, which had been silently resetting punctuation suggestions and clipboard retention.
• The microphone key no longer depends on a system voice input method existing.
• Default keyboard height, padding, toolbar keys and key hints tuned from device testing.

[Component] Voice model, Parakeet 110m — not an app download

Release notes for version oice-model-parakeet-110m-en

[Component] Voice engine libraries — not an app download

Native speech-recognition libraries for SonderKey voice typing, taken
unmodified from the sherpa-onnx 1.13.4 Android release.

sherpa-onnx is by the k2-fsa project and licensed Apache-2.0:
https://github.com/k2-fsa/sherpa-onnx

Downloaded on demand rather than bundled, so the app stays small for
anyone who does not use voice typing.

ABI	sha256
arm64-v8a	f918b7ca0b958a6a53ad55a1293452483fe1e39e76520714ade69d656e68d5b8
armeabi-v7a	6e27be6dea405dfb11f443944daf7f4434050ea5811ff22b3fa06e42d572c40e

Full Changelog: v1.0.1...voice-engine-1.13.4

v1.0.1

SonderKey 1.0.1

• Fixed: app name now shows SonderKey everywhere (welcome wizard, system settings, IME list)
• Settings: monotone icons on category headers across all settings screens for faster scanning

All 1.0.0 features included: Sonder themes, animated key presses, tuned defaults, offline variants.