Enable Text Suggestions For Hardware Keyboard in Windows 10

Windows 10 includes a touch keyboard for computers and tablets with a touch screen which supports Auto Correction and Auto Suggestions. When you touch any text field on your tablet, the touch keyboard appears on the screen. Windows 10 "Redstone 4" version 1803 comes with an ability to enable Auto Correction and Text Suggestions for your hardware keyboard.

It is possible to enable Text Suggestions (Text Prediction) for a hardware keyboard connected to your device.

The text suggestion feature for the hardware keyboard is disabled by default. It can be enabled in Settings. Once you enable this feature, Windows 10 will display up to three text suggestions while you are typing in a text area. See the following screenshot:

The Text Suggestions feature comes in handy for people who happen to be poor spellers and/or poor typists (for instance, myself). Everyone makes typos and the Text Suggestions feature is incredibly useful to fix them, just like you can do on smartphones. Also, it can save your time by predicting words as long as you have typed a few letters. Here is how to enable it.

To enable Text Suggestions for the hardware keyboard Windows 10, do the following.

1. Open Settings.
2. Go to Time & language -> Keyboard.
3. On the right, select your keyboard in the list and click on the Options button.
4. On the next page, enable the option Show text suggestions as I type on the hardware keyboard under Hardware keyboard as shown below.

Alternatively, you can apply a Registry tweak.

Enable Text Suggestions For Hardware Keyboard with Registry Tweak

1. Open the Registry Editor app.
2. Go to the following Registry key.

   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Input\Settings\proc_1\loc_0409\im_1

   See how to go to a Registry key with one click.

3. On the right, create a new 32-Bit DWORD value EnableHwkbTextPrediction.
   Note: Even if you are running 64-bit Windows you must still create a 32-bit DWORD value.
   Set its value data to 1.
4. Sign out from your user account and sign in back.

Note: The loc_0409 portion in the Registry path represents the English keyboard. You need to replace it with the appropriate subkey which matches your current input language, e.g. loc_0419 for Russian.

As of this writing, the text suggestions feature appears to be working only for the English language.

 

That's it.