"ICON button" for voice

[RustyE]

Is there a way to create an “icon button” (i.e. showing a microphone) to allow the user to touch the button to then speak/record their voice or perform some other function.
I presume we could use a non-used extended ascii code or something and have the application then decide what to do, but can this button display a graphic instead of a character or word?
If so, how would one do this?
thanks,

[Ken_Keyes]

Hi Rusty, I don’t know of any way to do this currently. Additionally, not being a developer myself, I am not familiar with the current Keyman roadmap, but I would imagine that this is quite a ways down the road. I think the Keyman team has some other issues they are trying to iron out at this point.
I know this is not the answer you were hoping for…

[Marc]

Hi @RustyE,

As Ken said, voice support is not on our near-term roadmap. However, I don’t think that’s quite what you were asking for!

Adding your own key to a custom keyboard that you create and use within your app is certainly possible.

There are a few ways you can include a custom icon:

1. Use an emoji character. This is pretty painless but the look may vary depending on the device.
2. Include a custom font with your keyboard that has the image as a character (preferably in the PUA area)
3. Include a custom CSS file for the keyboard, with an image embedded as a base64 blob. A complete example is probably beyond the scope of this forum, and the custom CSS support is currently pretty sparsely documented, but you may find Advanced [Re]styling of Mobile Keyboards with CSS interesting as well as https://help.keyman.com/developer/language/reference/kmw_embedcss.

That covers including a custom icon.

In terms of triggering an action in the app, yes, you could cause that key to emit a character (e.g. a PUA character is ideal), and make your app respond to attempts to insert that character as appropriate. That’s probably the simplest way to achieve integration.