Password manager chips & smart replies

Two different things can show up as chips inside the suggestion strip, and they arrive over the same Android API.

The first is your password manager. Tap into a login field and it can offer its saved entries as chips instead of popping up its own dropdown over the keyboard. Tap one and the field fills. The keyboard itself never sees the username or password that went into it.

The second is Android System Intelligence, which reads the conversation on screen and proposes short replies (“On my way!”, “Sounds good”). Those show up beside your word suggestions rather than replacing them.

They look similar, but the keyboard keeps them well apart. Each lane has its own toggle, its own limit on how many chips it may show, and its own rules about how much of the strip it gets. Wanting saved logins in the strip says nothing about wanting the system to read your messages, and the other way round.

Screenshot pending

Saved-login chips from a password manager, filling the suggestion strip on a login field.

Password manager chips

Focus a login field with a password manager set as your system autofill service, and its saved entries (if it has any for that app or site) appear as chips across the suggestion strip. The chips take over the strip completely while they’re up, so word suggestions don’t share the row with them. That’s deliberate: a saved login answers the field directly, which beats anything the dictionary could offer. Tap one to fill the field the same way you would from the manager’s own dropdown.

Screenshot pending

Dismissing the chip row to type normally instead.

There’s a dismiss button (✕) at the end of the row if you’d rather ignore the chips and type or search normally. Tapping it clears the chips until the next response comes in, which in practice usually means the next field you focus.

The keyboard asks for up to six chips and sizes them to the strip’s height, and no single chip may be wider than half the screen — a long address is ellipsized rather than taking the whole row, so you can always see that there’s another entry beside it. The row scrolls horizontally for the rest.

Chips are also cleared automatically the moment you leave the field, so a login suggestion for one app never lingers into the next field you tap, in this app or another one.

Which password managers work

There’s no allowlist of specific apps. Inline autofill chips use Android’s standard inline-suggestions API, so any password manager that supports it and is set as your device’s autofill service can offer chips this way: Google’s built-in password manager, Bitwarden, 1Password, Dashlane, and others that implement the same platform API. The keyboard requests a chip size and count from whatever service is active. It doesn’t know or care which one it’s talking to.

The feature needs Android 11 (API 30) or newer. On older versions, the setting doesn’t appear and the suggestion strip behaves exactly as it always has. Your password manager’s own autofill dropdown still works, it just isn’t drawn inline.

Both sides have to opt in. The keyboard declares that it can host inline suggestions, and your password manager has to support them too — if either half is missing, Android falls back to the manager’s own dropdown drawn over the keyboard.

Smart replies

When you tap into a reply box in a messaging app, Android System Intelligence may offer a few one-tap answers to whatever’s on screen. Up to three of them appear at a time, and they’re drawn by the system, not by the keyboard, the same way password manager chips are.

Where they sit depends on what else the strip is doing:

• Nothing typed yet. The replies take the row, with a ✕ to dismiss them. This is the case they’re for: the message is on screen, the box is empty, and the reply is the whole answer.
• You’ve started typing. They move to the tail of the strip, after the word candidates and any emoji predictions, behind a thin divider. Word suggestions keep their usual three slots; the reply row is width-capped and scrolls if all three don’t fit.
• A recently-copied paste chip is also up. The paste chip shrinks to its narrow form instead of stretching, and the replies take the rest of the row.

Tapping a reply commits it through the system, exactly as it would from the reply surface the system draws itself.

Not every app offers replies, and the system decides when it has something worth suggesting. An empty strip in a chat app usually means the system had nothing to offer, not that the setting is off.

Replies aren’t the only thing this lane can carry. The system also sends action chips, which are shortcuts into another app rather than something to type. They share the same toggle and the same three slots, and they’re sorted behind plain replies, so a reply always gets the room first.

Options

WM Keyboard›Typing›Suggestions›Password manager suggestions WM Keyboard›Typing›Suggestions›Smart replies

Both toggles are on by default, and both only show up in the Typing screen on Android 11 and newer.

Password manager suggestions off stops the keyboard requesting inline suggestions at all. Your password manager’s normal autofill dropdown still applies — it just draws over the keyboard the way it did before this feature existed, instead of inside the strip. The setting has no effect until a password manager is actually set as your system autofill service, since without one there’s nothing to request chips from either way.

Turning it off also turns off smart replies, whatever that toggle says. Android makes one inline request per field and both kinds of chip come back down it, so asking for replies is also what sends your saved logins into the strip instead of into your manager’s dropdown — there’s no way to accept one and decline the other. Off means the keyboard asks for nothing, and your manager draws its own UI again.

Smart replies off stops the keyboard asking the system for replies. Nothing else about the strip changes, and login chips are unaffected. (The reverse isn’t true, as above: login chips off takes replies with it.)

Turning both off means the keyboard doesn’t ask for inline suggestions at all.

Details & edge cases

• The keyboard never sees a chip’s contents. Chips are drawn by the password manager or by the system, not by the keyboard. The keyboard only says how much space is available, a size and a chip count, and gets back an opaque view it displays as-is. Whatever username, password or suggested reply sits behind a chip stays inside the other process the whole time.
• Chips follow the keyboard’s theme. The request names the strip’s own chip background and text colors, so a saved login looks like the word suggestions it sits among instead of a system-default pill dropped onto a dark board. Only colors are set — the sender still decides the text, the icon and the layout — and the very first request after the keyboard’s process starts goes out without them, because the theme isn’t resolved until the board has drawn once. Your password manager can ignore all of it, in which case you get its own styling, which is always legible.
• Arriving chips wake the strip up. The bar above the keys rests on the toolbar (tool icons) when there’s nothing to suggest, and chips from either lane count as something to suggest, so the strip takes the row when they land. That matters because neither kind of chip arrives while you’re typing. A password field has no word candidates, and a smart reply comes before you’ve written anything.
• Login chips stay on in incognito. The saved-login chips keep appearing while incognito mode is on, whether you switched it on manually or it engaged automatically because the field asked for no personalized learning. They record nothing, the keyboard never sees what’s in them, and a private browsing tab is exactly where you log in. Smart replies are the one kind that incognito does block: a proposed reply means the system read the conversation on screen.
• Password fields are exactly where these belong. Secure and password fields aren’t specially blocked from autofill, and neither is incognito. They’re where you’d expect a password manager to have something to offer. (Password fields do suppress the ordinary word-suggestion strip, which is a separate and unrelated behavior. See incognito & secure fields.)
• Independent of the general suggestions toggle. Turning off the main Suggestions toggle, the one for word predictions above the keyboard, doesn’t affect either kind of chip. They’re checked separately, so you can have one without the other.
• Tapping a chip vibrates and clicks like a key, following your haptics and key sound settings. The chip is drawn by another app, so the keyboard never sees the tap itself; it notices the chips being taken away just before the field fills, and buzzes then. A password manager that asks you to unlock it first opens its unlock screen instead, and that tap doesn’t vibrate.
• The ✕ clears both lanes. Dismissing chips means “stop offering me things about this field”, and both lanes are answering the same field, so both go until the next response.
• Requires Android 11 or newer. Login chips additionally need a password manager currently set as the system autofill service. Anything missing means the strip just behaves as if the feature weren’t there.

Available identically on both editions of the keyboard.

For everything else that shows up in the suggestion strip, see Suggestions & prediction. For how incognito mode and secure fields affect what the keyboard remembers and suggests, see Incognito & secure fields.