Chrome side panel
Auto typer for Chrome
Typist enters text you have prepared into the one browser field you have focused, character by character, at a speed you choose. You watch it go in, and you can pause or stop part of the way through.
Free plan: 300 words a day. A Google sign-in is required before typing.
What an auto typer does
An auto typer takes text you already have and enters it into a field as keyboard input, one character after another, instead of dropping the whole block in at once. That sounds like a small difference from pasting, and for a short line it is. Over a long piece of text it changes what you can do while the text is going in.
A paste is a single event: the field is empty, then it is full. An auto typer spreads the same characters over as long as you want, so you can read along, notice a mistake before the whole thing has landed, and stop. The field also receives the text the way it receives anything else you type, so editors that format, autocomplete or count characters as you write behave as they normally do. We put the two side by side on auto typer vs copy-paste.
Where Typist can type
This is the part most auto typer pages are vague about, so here is the specific list. Typist types into the field you clicked into, and it works with:
- Text boxes. The ordinary single-line input fields you find in forms, search bars and short answer boxes.
- Text areas. The larger multi-line boxes used for messages, notes, and long-form answers.
- Rich-text editors. Any editable region a page has made editable — comment boxes, chat composers, and the editing surfaces inside web apps.
- Google Docs. Docs does not use an ordinary text box, so Typist has dedicated support for it. There is a longer explanation on auto type in Google Docs.
If you press Start without one of those focused, Typist does not guess where the text should go. It stops and asks you to click into a text field first. That is deliberate: text arriving in the wrong place is worse than text not arriving at all.
One field at a time
Typist types into the single field you focused, and that is the whole of what it touches. It does not click buttons, submit forms, follow links, switch tabs, or move from one field to the next. If you need a script that drives a whole page, you are looking for browser automation rather than an auto typer — we compare the two here.
Speed you set, and can change
The panel has a words-per-minute slider running from 20 to 400. It starts at 60, and there are presets at 40, 60, 100, 150, 250 and 400 if you would rather not drag anything. A progress indicator shows how far through the text you are, and pause, resume and stop are all available mid-run.
There are two pacing modes. The first is a varied pace that takes a short pause at punctuation, so a long paragraph arrives in readable stretches rather than one unbroken stream. The second is a fast steady mode, roughly eight times quicker, with no pauses at all — the right choice when you simply want the text in the field and you are not watching it go. More on choosing a speed.
Saved snippets
A snippet is a titled block of text saved to your account. Save one on your desktop and it is in the panel on your laptop next time you sign in. The free plan holds three; Pro holds as many as you like. Editing one you already own never counts against the limit, and if a Pro subscription lapses your snippets are kept and keep syncing — you just cannot add new ones until you are back under three. How snippets work.
What we do and do not receive
The text in the panel stays on your device and goes only to the page you are typing into. The one exception is a snippet you deliberately save, which is stored so it can reach your other devices. Signing in with Google is required before a run, and the only things we ask Google for are your account identifier and verified email address. The privacy page sets this out line by line.
Questions
- Do I have to sign in?
- Yes, with a Google account, before the first run. The daily word allowance is counted per account, so there has to be an account to count against.
- How much does it cost?
- The free plan types 300 words a day and resets at 00:00 UTC. Pro is $4.99 a month for unlimited words and unlimited snippets, and can be cancelled at any time. See pricing.
- What happens if I stop a run halfway?
- The words are counted against your day the moment you press Start, so a run you stop early still spends what it set aside. Worth knowing before you start a long piece on the free plan.
- Can it type into a password box or a verification field?
- We make no claim about fields of that kind. Typist is built for ordinary editable fields, and plenty of pages guard their inputs in ways it does not attempt to work around.
- Where do I start?
- The step-by-step walkthrough is on how to type text automatically.