The Raycast Custom Keyboard on iOS gives you direct access to your favourite iOS features across all your apps.

The custom keyboard is designed to be a secondary keyboard. That means it doesn’t replace your everyday typing keyboard. Instead you’ll use the 🌐 icon in the bottom left to switch to Raycast when you need to access your content.

Setup

You can setup the custom keyboard by following the onboarding flow in Settings. You’ll be guided and redirected to the system settings to toggle the keyboard and Allow Full Access.

Enabling the “Allow Full Access” is essential to the keyboards functionality.

Features

The custom keyboard is packed with your favourite Raycast iOS features.

AI & AI Commands

You can run AI Commands on content in the active text field. By default, it uses the full content of the input. However, you can also select specific text if you only want to run a command on a portion of the input.

Dictation

Dictation brings a quicker way to get your thoughts down on paper screen. Tapping the record button first time will redirect you to the Raycast app. This is a necessary step, since keyboards don’t have direct access to the microphone.

For a smoother experience for multiple quick dictations, we default to a 5 minute recording session. This means that you won’t need to redirect to the main app each time you want to dictate. You’ll see a live activity in the dynamic island indicating there’s an active session. If you wish to avoid this 5 minute window, you can change the setting to immediately terminate and require redirection each time.

You can end a session through the live activity or in the main app by tapping the power button.

Post-processing with AI

You can decide to run your dictation through a post-processing flow to modify the output before it’s added to the input.

The default dictation already does a good job. But we’ve added two built in commands for email and notes. These have additional instructions to help with formatting for different contexts.

You can also run your custom AI commands for more specific needs, like creating your own writing language, or translating to a different language.

Quicklinks

Effortlessly share your Quicklinks with others from the keyboard. Dynamic placeholders also work for more advanced links.

Snippets

Breeze through your emails, or access your library of symbols. Again, dynamic placeholders also work here.

Recents

The first thing you’ll see when switching to the Raycast keyboard is a tile of recent items. This gives you quick access to the commands and content you use most frequently.

Settings & Customization

There’s a few settings and options to configure for the custom keyboard. All accessible through Settings → Keyboard.

AI Model

For the Ask AI command, you can select the AI model to be used.

Languages

You can configure which languages the typing keyboard supports, which is used when typing in Search, Ask AI or Dynamic Placeholders.

To switch language, long-press the bottom right of the space bar.

Dictation Insert

By default, the dictation output is added to the input automatically. This is for the most efficient workflow.

But if you wish, you can change this setting so you have a review step before inserting the output.

Recording Disabling

By default, a dictation session is setup when you first use dictation. This last for 5 minutes, allowing you to more quickly start without the need to redirect to the main app.

You can change this to disable immediately. By doing so, each time you use dictation you’ll be redirected to the main app to start the recording.

Switch to Next keyboard

This setting is disabled by default.

When enabled, if you dismiss the keyboard, upon reactivating, you’ll be switch back to the next keyboard.

In the case where you have your primary keyboard and Raycast. Dismissing while Raycast is active will switch you back to the primary keyboard.

Discover more tips

Pedro recorded a walkthrough video for the keyboard, sharing tips and ideas on how to best use Raycast Keyboard on iOS.