Text suggestion is a built-in feature in Windows 11 that significantly enhances your typing experience. A major advantage of this program is its speed and the ability to get immediate feedback after typing. After typing a few words, you will know whether your message is correct or not. Sometimes, it can also detect potential errors and make corrections for you. You can now enable Text Suggestion or Prediction for the hardware keyboard in Windows 11 and Windows 10.
What are Text Suggestions and why do you need them?
When you type on a keyboard, this feature will automatically suggest some relevant words that are more likely to match your preferred word. For example, when I type into the search box, it will suggest people, organizations, and other information that I might be looking for, based on my search terms. If I plug in a search term to find favorite places, Windows suggests places I’ve already been to. Furthermore, it will suggest an acceptable name for the person if you type the name into the search box.
Enable Text Prediction for Hardware Keyboard in Windows 11
Text suggestions are the predictive words that appear on the screen when you start to type. These programs predict the words you are likely to type next so that you can type faster and more accurately. In other words, they help you interact with your computer more efficiently by predicting the next words that you might type and speeding up your typing.
To enable or disable text suggestions on Windows 11, follow the steps below:
- Press Win+I in combination to open the Windows 11 Settings. Alternatively, you can right-click the Start button on the Taskbar and choose Settings from the list of options displayed therein.
- From the side panel on the left, select Time and language heading.
- On the right, switch to Typing section. Click the side arrow to expand the menu.
- When typing on the physical keyboard, slide the toggle next to ‘Show text suggestions when typing on the physical keyboard‘ to the On or Off position.
- Similarly, configure options for Autocorrect misspelled words and Multilingual text suggestions.
When done, text suggestions when typing on the physical keyboard will be enabled.
Windows 10
Open Windows 10 Settings > Devices and switch to Keyboard section.
Scroll to Hardware keyboard.
- Toggle on “Show text suggestions as I type“
- Toggle on “Autocorrect misspelled words I type“
That’s it!
How does it work
This works across Windows Apps, including Notepad and so on. It doesn’t work on third-party applications like Chrome.
As soon as you start typing, you will see suggestions popping up with a maximum of three or four words. To select one of the suggested words, press the up arrow and then navigate using the left and right arrow keys. And to complete a word, hit space to pick up one from the suggestions.
If you don’t stick to the exact words of English, you can choose to disable autocorrection of misspelled words.
That said, not supporting every application is a huge drawback, especially regarding Chrome. Many users use Chrome on Windows for everything, and such users will have to use Predictive Text.
Does it work with every language?
Officially, Microsoft claims to have it working with English US only, but I see it works with all languages that are supported for the software-based keyboard on Windows. I tried a few Hindi words, and it did suggest them.
It includes Assamese, Bashkir, Belarusian, Greenlandic, Hawaiian, Icelandic, Igbo, Irish, Kyrgyz, Luxembourgish, Maltese, Maori, Mongolian, Nepali, Pashto, Sakha, Tajik, Tatar, Tswana, Turkmen, Urdu, Uyghur, Welsh, Xhosa, Yoruba, Zulu, etc.
What are the benefits of using Text Suggestions?
Let’s discuss the importance of Text Suggestions and how they may benefit your work. The text suggestions are useful throughout your writing process to improve your typing speed. It can help in many ways, like if you want to produce shorter and more effective texts, avoid grammatical mistakes and typos, and create a beautiful flow of words and phrases. Additionally, this option can also be helpful when working with business documents or other documents of a long length.
Where is Time and Language on Windows 11 Settings?
Time & language on Settings can be accessed readily from the side panel of the Windows Settings. It can be used either to get a new language or set typing preferences (autocorrect/show text suggestions, etc). Note – For some languages, you might need to manually download a speech pack.
Enable Multilingual Text Prediction in Windows 11
Not only is it easier to switch between two languages when using a software keyboard, Microsoft has also enabled Multilingual text prediction, which works for hardware keyboards as well.
So if you are writing in more than one Latin script language, text prediction works.
- Go to Settings > Devices
- Switch to Keyboard section.
- Scroll to Multilingual text prediction.
- Enable toggle for “Show text predictions based on the recognized languages you’re typing in“
Let us know if you find using this feature useful.
