Hello everyone,
jKey 2026.1 is out, and it is the biggest change to the keyboard since I first posted about it here. The short version is that the prediction engine has been thrown away and rebuilt from scratch. The old one leaned on Apple Intelligence, which meant predictions were slow, only worked on newer devices, and often were not the words I had asked for. All of that is gone. jKey now carries its own language model inside the keyboard.
For anyone meeting it for the first time, jKey is a third-party keyboard for iPhone and iPad built for VoiceOver users. Rather than hunting for individual letters, you tap five large clusters of letters and the keyboard works out which word you meant.
## Cluster Only Mode, rebuilt
The five clusters hold the letters q, w, e, a, s and d; then r, t, y, u, f, g and h; then i, o, p, j, k and l; then z, x and c; and finally v, b, n and m. In Cluster Only Mode you tap one cluster for each letter of the word you want, without ever picking a letter, and the words that match appear immediately in the bar above the clusters. To type "hello" you tap clusters two, one, three, three and three, and "hello" is sitting there waiting for you.
Several things about that experience have changed in this release. The prediction bar now lives in the suggestion strip along the top, with a previous-page arrow at the left edge and a next-page arrow at the right, showing three words at a time and letting you page through the rest. The old sequence display has been removed altogether, since it occupied a row and told you nothing you could not already hear. The cluster keys now sit in exactly the same screen positions they occupy in the letters keyboard, so your muscle memory carries between the two modes rather than being relearned each time you switch. Between words the bar offers a full stop, comma, question mark and exclamation mark, so a whole sentence can be punctuated without leaving the mode, and after a question the question mark is offered first. There is now a close-keyboard button in the control row. Finally, an ABC button takes you to the letters keyboard and the Cluster Only button brings you back, with your text and context kept intact; the keyboard reopens in whichever mode you used last, and you can choose the default under Settings, Cluster Only Mode, Keyboard Opens In.
## The new prediction engine
The keyboard now carries a language model of 95,243 words, 652,518 word pairs and 545,035 word triples, built from open-source word lists and word-sequence statistics. The sources are all credited, with their licences, under Settings, Acknowledgements.
What this means in practice is that predictions are ranked by what actually follows what in English. After "how are" the keyboard expects "you", and after "thank" it expects "you" as well. Because the model holds word triples, it weighs the two words before the cursor rather than only the one immediately preceding. It is also genuinely instant: the lookup is a constrained walk over a memory-mapped file that finishes in the same frame as your tap, so there is no spinner, no delay, and no waiting for a model to warm up. None of it involves the network. There is no networking code in the keyboard at all and no AI service of any kind, so nothing you type can leave your device; Full Access is needed only if you want the Copy and Paste snippet commands. And because the model ships inside the app, it works on every supported device rather than only the ones that can run Apple Intelligence.
The same engine now drives the ordinary suggestion bar in letter mode as well. It completes the word you are part-way through, predicts the next one, and capitalises properly at the start of a sentence, including "I" and "I'm".
## Learning, entirely on your device
Words you pick in Cluster Only Mode rise in the rankings over time, but the more useful behaviour is that jKey remembers pairs. If you once picked a particular word after a particular preceding word, that word gets a strong boost the next time you are in the same position, so names, in-jokes and habitual turns of phrase settle in quickly. Your contacts and your iOS text replacements are already reachable without any setup.
New in this release is My Words. Finish typing a word jKey does not know and the suggestion bar offers to add it as the last item in the bar; tap that and the word is predicted everywhere from then on. You can also add and remove words yourself under Settings, My Words.
## VoiceOver
Most of the remaining work in this release went here. Settings, VoiceOver, Key Activation now offers three ways for keys to activate. Standard is the familiar behaviour, where you swipe to a key and double tap to activate it. Touch Typing lets you touch a key to hear it, slide around to explore, and lift your finger to activate it. Direct Touch activates a key immediately on a single tap. Touch Typing and Direct Touch both require VoiceOver's own Direct Touch to be turned on for whichever app you are typing in, which you do by focusing the keyboard, turning the rotor to Direct Touch and flicking up; iOS then remembers the choice for that app.
In those two modes, Cluster Only Mode gains gestures. Swiping right inserts the highlighted prediction, and swiping down or up moves through the predictions and speaks each one, wrapping around so that swiping up from the first word jumps to the last. Swipes that begin on a key no longer read or activate that key, so a gesture is never mistaken for a keystroke.
There is also a new Verbose Announcements switch under Settings, Cluster Only Mode. With it on you hear the full picture after every cluster tap, along the lines of "Added. Sequence: 1-2. the, 1 of 15." With it off, the cluster keys give a short vibration instead of being spoken and all you hear after each tap is the top predicted word, just "the." I have been typing with it off and it is dramatically faster.
The rest of the VoiceOver work is smaller but adds up. The startup announcement is now a few words rather than a paragraph. Character keys are no longer spoken twice in the direct modes, since VoiceOver's own typing feedback already echoes them. Announcements queue behind key readouts instead of cutting them off part-way. Holding Delete repeats with acceleration, and the Delete key still carries its rotor actions for deleting by character, by word, by line, or everything at once.
## Also in this release
Parental Controls adds a profanity filter, on by default, which keeps offensive words out of predictions, suggestions and My Words. It never affects what you type yourself, and you can switch it off. Settings has been reorganised into one screen per category rather than a single long list. Snippets, snippet commands, emoji groups and the appearance options, meaning the high-contrast colour schemes, custom colours and three text sizes, are all unchanged and all still there.
## Requirements and feedback
jKey needs iOS or iPadOS 18.2 or later and runs on iPhone and iPad. It costs $1.99 and is on the App Store here:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jkey-accessible-keyboard/id6746700520
To turn it on, go to Settings, General, Keyboard, Keyboards, Add New Keyboard and choose jKey. Turn on Allow Full Access only if you want the Copy and Paste snippet commands.
I would particularly like to hear how Cluster Only Mode holds up in real messages, and whether having Verbose Announcements off is the right default for the rest of you. If a word you use often never appears near the top, please tell me the word and what you typically type just before it. That is exactly the case the new engine was built to handle, so knowing where it falls down is genuinely useful to me.
Thanks,
Jamie