Support
The panel tells you what went wrong. This page tells you why.
Most failures announce themselves: the panel turns red and says what happened. Below is every message it can show, what each one means, and what to do — followed by the handful of behaviours that surprise people even when nothing is broken.
Getting the first run working
Four checks account for nearly every report that begins “it does nothing”.
- 1
Check the Chrome version
The side panel API landed in Chrome 114. On anything older the panel cannot open at all. Visit chrome://version to see what you are on.
- 2
Open the panel from the toolbar icon
The side panel is the extension's only interface. There is no popup, no options page and no keyboard shortcut — if the panel is not open, nothing is running.
- 3
Accept the prompt on the first Start
Site access is an optional permission, so installing shows no warning at all. The first time you press Start — or Pick field — Chrome asks once. Decline it and nothing happens; press Start again to be asked again.
- 4
Try Play before you try Start
Play replays the rhythm inside the panel's own box and needs no access to the page whatsoever. If Play works and Start does not, the problem is the page or the permission, not the engine.
What the panel is telling you
Every message that can appear under the buttons, what each one actually means, and what to do about it. The panel's red ones come first; the last two are only status.
Where it cannot type
Four kinds of place, for three different reasons. None of them is a bug, and none is fixable from this end.
- Chrome's own pageschrome:// · devtools:// · about:
- Chrome refuses injection into its own surfaces, the Web Store, and other extensions' pages. The panel says so plainly rather than appearing to work and doing nothing.
- Google Docscanvas-rendered
- Docs paints its text onto a canvas instead of keeping it in editable elements, so there is no field to aim at. Nothing on this side reaches it.
- Embedded framescross-origin iframes
- Only the top-level page is typed into. A field served from another domain inside the page — an embedded comment box, a hosted payment form — is never found, and reports itself as no editable field.
- Fields that do not hold textdate · checkbox · readonly
- Pickable fields are textareas, contenteditable regions, and inputs of type text, search, url, tel, email, password or number. Anything disabled or read-only is skipped.
Rich text editors that manage their own document model — ProseMirror, Lexical, Slate and CodeMirror 6 — do work. The extension fires beforeinput and lets the editor apply its own transaction, which is the same path your own keyboard takes.
Behaviour that surprises people
Not faults — decisions. Each of these comes up often enough to be worth writing down.
Stop lands on the next keystroke
Stop is honoured between keys rather than in the middle of one. If the typist happens to be in the middle of a long thinking pause when you press it, the run takes a beat to actually end.
Closing the panel does not stop the run
The typing happens in the page, not in the panel. Close the panel mid-run and the text keeps arriving. Reopen it and the progress bar comes back, though the status line above it starts out blank.
The picked field belongs to the page
A pick is held by the page you made it on, not saved in the extension. Navigate away, reload the tab, or reopen the panel and it is gone — the panel goes back to typing into whatever is focused.
Typing goes to whichever tab is in front
A run targets the active tab at the moment you press Start, not the tab you picked a field on. Once it has begun, switching tabs is fine: it carries on typing into the tab it started in.
Picking is a click on a field, or nothing
While the picker is open the page is dimmed and its own clicks are swallowed. Clicking somewhere that is not a field is a miss rather than a cancel — press Esc on the page to cancel. An abandoned picker gives up after a minute and a half, and the highlight simply disappears.
Choosing a typist resets the speed
Each typist carries its own natural pace, so picking one moves the slider to it. Set your own speed after choosing the typist, not before.
Turning typos off changes only the typos
The jitter between keys, the warm-up, the pauses at sentence boundaries and the fatigue drift all stay exactly as they were. Only the mistakes stop.
Line breaks vanish in single-line fields
A one-line input cannot hold them, so newlines in your draft are dropped rather than submitting the form early.
A very long run can be left hanging
Chrome may shut down the extension's background worker partway through a long run. The typing itself carries on, but the panel can be left showing a progress bar that never completes. Press Stop and start again from where it reached.
Limits and requirements
The numbers the panel works to, in one place.
- Browser
- Chrome 114 or newer
- Extension
- Manifest V3 — no content script, no remote code
- Per run
- 20,000 characters
- Typists
- Hunt and peck · Casual · Touch typist · Speed demon
- Speed
- 10 to 140 wpm, counting a word as five characters
- Countdown
- None, 3, 5 or 10 seconds — 3 by default
- Preview
- The first 90 characters, replayed inside the panel
- Settings
- Typist, speed, typos and countdown, in Chrome's sync storage
- Draft
- In this device's local storage, and nowhere else
Still stuck
Nothing above matching what you are seeing means it is worth an email. It goes to the developer who builds this, and it is answered by the same person.
What to put in it
- Your Chrome version, from chrome://version.
- The site and the field — a URL helps far more than a description of one.
- The exact message the panel showed, if it showed one.
- The typist and speed you were on, and whether typos were switched on.
- What you expected to happen, and what happened instead.
That is usually enough to reproduce a problem without a second round of questions.