I switch between English and Chinese dozens of times a day. Texts with family in Chinese, work emails in English, group chats in both. The fastest way to get my thoughts out is voice — but every keyboard I tried made me choose.
The stock keyboards have voice recognition that barely works. It’s either English or Chinese, never both in the same flow, and the accuracy makes me retype half of what I said. They’re free, sure. But the experience is miserable.
So I tried third-party keyboards built on Whisper. The voice got better. But the typing experience fell apart — clunky layouts, bad predictions, no feel. I gained something and lost something else.
I ended up juggling three keyboards. One for English typing. One for Chinese. One for voice when I needed it. Every day, switching between IMEs mid-conversation, losing my train of thought, fighting my phone instead of using it.
One day I stopped tolerating it.
Linkeys is one keyboard that does all of it. English and Chinese with a swipe to switch. Voice that handles both languages because it uses a model that actually can.
Some keyboards can handle a quick mixed phrase — “我们要把这个feature push到production” — and get it right. But try dictating a longer thought. A few sentences where you drift between languages, pause to think, throw in a technical term. The quality falls apart. And they all use push-to-talk, so you’d better know exactly what you want to say before you start.
Linkeys works differently. Tap once to start, talk at your own pace, tap once to stop. It’s built for the way you actually think out loud — slowly, in two languages, with pauses.
Typing that feels right because I refused to ship it until it did. No auto-correct rewriting your words — suggestions are there when you want them, invisible when you don’t.
It’s opinionated software. It does fewer things, but the things it does, it does well.
I’ve been using it as my daily keyboard for months. It’s the one I reach for when I’m not thinking about which keyboard to reach for. That’s all I ever wanted.
If you live between two languages, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Give it a try.