Dictating

Three steps

1. Click into any text box on any website: a chat, an email, a search bar, a form or an AI prompt.
2. Ukti’s small control appears beside the box. Press the microphone. The button turns red, which means Ukti is listening.
3. Speak Bangla. What you say appears in the box in Bengali script, wherever the cursor was. To stop, press the mic again, or Esc.

You can also start and stop with Ctrl+Shift+Space.

The control

At first the control shows only a microphone and an arrow. Press the arrow and the other buttons open along a curve that leans toward the nearer edge of the screen:

• অ: turns typed Banglish into Bangla. See Banglish to Bangla.
• EN: turns the text in the box into English. See Translating to English.
• Undo: puts back what was there before Ukti’s last change.
• A grip, for dragging the control somewhere else.

The control is kept apart from the page’s own design, so no website’s colours or fonts can change it, and it changes nothing on the site.

What you see while speaking

While you speak, a small preview opens above the box. Words still being heard are bright; words that are settled are a little quieter. When a sentence is finished it goes into the box. The ring around the mic moves with your voice. If the internet drops, the ring turns amber; if something goes wrong, red.

Output: Bangla or English

Press Ukti’s icon in the toolbar, and under Output choose which language your words go in as. Choose English and you speak Bangla while the box receives the English translation. This needs the language packs.

A few more settings

From the toolbar icon, in the Words tab, under Behaviour:

• Drop filler words (on from the start): removes “ইয়ে”, repeated “মানে মানে”, and “আর কি” or “বুঝলা” at the end of a clause.
• Send when I stop speaking (off at first): after a sentence goes in, stops the mic and sends the message, as if you had pressed Enter. Useful in chats.
• A sound on start and stop (off at first): a soft tone when the mic turns on and off.

Fields Ukti stays out of

The control does not appear, and dictation will not start, in password fields, one-time codes (OTP), PINs, card numbers, card security codes, or fields drawn as dots. Ukti recognises them from how the site marks them up.

Where your words go

For as long as the mic button is red, Chrome sends what the microphone hears, pauses included, to Google’s speech service. When the button is not red, Ukti hears nothing. If you would rather Google did not hear something, type it instead. The full account is in the privacy policy.