Ask a Question From Inside Any App | Loopal

The short answer

Hold the space bar inside any app and a conversation opens in the keyboard itself. Type the question, watch the answer stream in, and tap Insert into input to drop the text into the field you were typing in — or Copy to put it on the clipboard instead. You never leave the app, and you never have to copy text out of a chat window and paste it somewhere else.

Loopal is a Chinese keyboard on iOS 17 and later that also ships an English keyboard, and the assistant is available from either. It is still in development, so there is no download link yet — the rest of this page is about what the feature actually does, because the interesting details are the ones an app-store blurb leaves out.

Why you want to ask mid-conversation

The question you cannot answer is usually the one that arrives in the middle of something. You are three paragraphs into a reply to someone, and you need to know whether Thursday afternoon is free, or what a term means, or how to phrase the next sentence so it does not sound defensive. An assistant that lives in its own app makes you leave the conversation, remember what you were asking, copy the other side's message by hand if the answer needs it, and carry everything back.

That round trip is the whole cost, and it is why people decide the question was not worth asking. Answering in place removes it. The useful part of an assistant is rarely a long document; it is usually one line you needed while your thumbs were already busy.

How the space bar actually works

It is a two-stage gesture, and the two stages matter:

• While you hold the space bar, the keycap shows an "Ask Loopal" hint with a progress line running along it. The progress line is the announcement: you can still change your mind.
• If you keep holding, the conversation panel opens. Slide your finger off the key before then and the gesture cancels, hint and all.

The same entry point exists in three other forms, all doing the identical thing. The space keycap carries a small watermark when the gesture is available. The keyboard toolbar has an Ask Loopal button beside Replies, Quick Replies, Clipboard, Settings and Dismiss. And the space key exposes a VoiceOver custom action, so holding the space bar is not the only way in.

The gesture is only offered when it can actually work: the keyboard session is live, the input engine is ready, you are on the input page rather than inside the conversation, and your input is going into a host app's field. If you are mid-way through composing a Pinyin syllable, the gesture is not offered — a letter press is not a question.

What gets sent when you hold it

This is the part worth knowing precisely, because it is the part that decides whether you are comfortable using the gesture in a given field.

• If you have text selected in the field, that selection is the seed, up to a cap.
• If nothing is selected, the keyboard takes the text around the cursor in that field, up to that cap, split evenly before and after the cursor, so the closest text is always the text that makes it in.
• The seed is sent as the first line of the conversation. It is not local pre-processing. If you paste a long document into a field, select it all, and hold the space bar, a substantial part of that document goes to whichever backend you have configured. Sloppy seeding is easy to do by accident; the fix is to be deliberate about what is selected.
• If there is nothing to seed — an empty field, or a host app that exposes no surrounding text — the composer opens empty and you type the question yourself.

Each hold opens a new conversation. The previous thread is not continued; "Continue asking" is how you return to an existing one. Conversations are stored per backend, so if you switch from platform credits to your own key, the thread you were in does not carry over to the new backend.

What happens once the conversation is open

The empty composer offers three starting points — Help me reply to this, Make my wording more natural, and I want to ask a question — and any typed question works just as well.

• It can ask you something back. When the model needs a detail it does not have, it sends a choice card instead of guessing; you answer it with Continue or Skip. Nothing happens until you do.
• Answers stream in and can be stopped. Stopping keeps whatever partial answer had arrived. A failed turn offers Try again.
• Long conversations are condensed. Once earlier turns pile up, Loopal folds them into a summary and marks the spot with "Earlier turns condensed", so the visible transcript does not grow without bound. The summary is the model's, not a verbatim quote of what was said.
• What you do with the answer is your choice: insert it into the host field, or copy it. Files the assistant creates can be previewed inside the keyboard, with Markdown tables and code blocks expandable in place; a file too large to preview, or in a format the keyboard cannot render, is prepared for the main app instead.

When it is not the right tool

Honest limits, because the feature is genuinely good in its lane and genuinely bad outside it:

• Nothing is ever sent for you. The answer lands as text in the field. Reading it and pressing send is still yours.
• Every hold is a fresh thread. Follow-up work belongs inside one conversation; do not expect the gesture to remember the last one for you.
• The keyboard cannot sign in, configure a backend, or take a purchase. If no backend is configured, the panel says "Configure an available backend in the main app. Chinese input is unaffected." If the credit balance is empty, it says to open the main app to top up, because a keyboard extension has nowhere to show a purchase sheet. If the platform credential is not available yet, opening the main app once while online activates it. Every one of these is a detour to the app you were trying not to leave.
• The screen is a keyboard. It is a good surface for one paragraph, not for reading a research answer, comparing options, or iterating on a long draft.
• Full Access is mandatory. Turn it off in iOS Settings and the keyboard still types Chinese perfectly — but it has no network, cannot stay in sync with the main app, and the assistant simply will not work. That is the setting iOS shows the keyboard warning for, and it deserves a deliberate yes.

For anything longer than a reply, open the main app, where the same conversation, the same backend and your calendar, reminders and location are all reachable.

What Loopal does differently

Most assistants can be opened from anywhere. What is rare is one that is in the keyboard, in the field, with the answer going back into that field — and that treats the keyboard as the product rather than as a feature bolted onto an app. The two-stage hold with its visible progress line, the choice cards when the model needs more from you, and the per-backend conversation scoping all come from one decision: the answer should arrive where the question was asked, with nothing to carry it across.

Loopal also lets you choose where the request goes — platform credits, your own Anthropic, OpenAI, Doubao or Gemini key, or an Ollama server on your own network — which, for the app you type private messages into, is not a footnote. See choosing a backend for that side, and the three input modes for the keyboard itself.

If the in-keyboard answer is what you have been missing, Loopal is the page to follow; if it is not shipped yet, the keyboard it comes with — full Pinyin, 9-key and handwriting, switching at any time — is the part you would be using either way.