The AI keyboard for Instagram DMs.

Instagram is not WhatsApp with filters. The unit of conversation is often a story, a reel, a photo, or a sticker — and the typed reply is a caption on someone else's media. People freeze because they try to write a paragraph for a surface that rewards a short, specific reaction. KOPY on Instagram is a tool for that compression, not for household logistics and not for public ratio management on X.

We built the keyboard to sit in the DM composer and in story-reply fields. Those are different social contracts. Mixing them is how you send a board-meeting sentence to a close-friends story, or a flirty one-liner into a brand collab inbox.

Story replies are a genre, not a mini-email

A story reply is a tap on a fifteen-second object. The other person may be driving, filming, or clearing a stack of forty replies. Your job is to prove you saw the specific frame: the ugly hotel carpet, the dog's cone, the concert wristband. Generic love this is visually illiterate. The draft has to mention an artifact in the media even when the clipboard only captured their caption.

If they replied to your story first, you are in a nested genre: reaction-to-reaction. Continue tone is the right default. Agree is for when you want to close the loop. Funny is for when the story was already a joke. Dating and Rizz are only if the story was clearly a bid, not a product haul.

Visual context the keyboard cannot see

This is an iOS limitation, not a missing feature we are shy about. A keyboard extension inserts text. It does not get Instagram's image buffer. We read clipboard text after you copy a DM or a caption. If the meaning lives in the photo, you have to put a stub in the copy: a few words you type as a note, or the on-screen caption. Otherwise the model will invent a reaction to new post and you will sound like you never opened the story.

Practical stub: copy their text if any, then add a five-word human prefix in the composer after generation — that cone looks illegal. The keyboard draft supplies syntax. You supply the pixel. That hybrid is the Instagram-native workflow.

DM culture versus story-reply culture

DMs absorb longer arcs: collabs, customer questions, slow-burn flirt, friend catch-up that started from a meme. Story replies are fire-and-forget unless both people promote them into a DM thread. Know which room you are in before you pick Insight mode.

• Story reply: one beat, one object, optional question that is easy to answer with another story.
• Inbound DM from a stranger: boundary plus next step. Creators get where do I start a hundred times. Agree plus a pointer beats a custom essay.
• Existing friend DM: Continue. Reference the last hanging question, not the new reel they also posted.
• Flirty DM: Dating mode. Short. One turn of tension. Do not write a Hinge prompt essay in Instagram.

Creator inboxes are a volume problem with a taste constraint. You cannot hand-craft wit at two hundred unread. You also cannot send the same thanks so much for the support block. KOPY's job is a first draft that is specific enough to edit in ten seconds. Your job is the proper noun: their project's name, the reel hook, the city they mentioned.

The short-message tax on iPhone

Instagram's composer is hostile to long thought. The keyboard is large. The thread is a stack of bubbles next to profile chips. People overthink because they want to be interesting in twelve words. That is a harder writing problem than a Telegram essay. Constraints help: pick Funny or Continue, generate, cut until one concrete noun remains.

We run KOPY under the same extension rules as every other app. Allow Full Access is required for pasteboard reads, which is how we condition on the copied DM. Apple's custom keyboard model treats pasteboard as an open-access capability. See UIKit custom keyboards and the extension guide on UIPasteboard. Without Full Access, you are typing blind into a visual app, which is the worst combination.

Memory: the extension still lives near a 70MB ceiling. We do not embed a vision model in the keyboard to see the story. That would be a different product, a different privacy conversation, and a crash loop. Clipboard text plus your one-line stub is the honest architecture.

From sticker to conversation without sounding like a brand

GIF and sticker replies are valid. They also stall threads. If you want a conversation, the next message after a sticker should ask a small, answerable thing: was that the Tuesday set or the surprise guest. KOPY Continue drafts often produce that shape. If you want to close, Agree plus a single emoji you add yourself is enough. Do not generate four sentences of gratitude for a meme.

Collab DMs have a work register hiding in a social skin. People write would love to partner like it is a cold email. On Instagram that reads as spam. Work mode plus Question, then you strip the corporate nouns, is a better path than Social plus Funny, which will joke you out of a brief. Edit brand names by hand. The model should not guess a media kit URL.

What we score in Instagram drafts

These KPIs are editorial, not analytics from Instagram's API. We do not have your reach numbers and we will not invent them.

Surface	Target length	Must include	Disqualify
Story reply	One sentence	A visible object or caption hook	Love this with no noun
Stranger DM	One to two sentences	Boundary or pointer	False intimacy
Friend DM	Two sentences	Callback to prior thread	Restarting from the new reel only
Flirt DM	One to two sentences	One turn, one question	Paragraph rizz
Collab DM	Two to three sentences	Clear ask plus constraint	LinkedIn-cadence jargon

Modes that fit Instagram without leaking other products

Social is the default. Dating is for DMs that are actually dating. Insight is almost always wrong for a story reply; it writes an essay under a photo of soup. Work is for professional inboxes that happen to live in Instagram, then you humanize the output. Do not keep last-used Dating mode when answering a customer who asked about shipping.

We generate in under two seconds because story reply windows are short. The other person will swipe away. That is not a reason to skip the object-noun edit. A fast generic line is still generic.

Clipboard hygiene in a screenshot culture

Instagram users copy captions, usernames, and sometimes dump screenshots into Notes. KOPY only sees text on the pasteboard. If you copy a username accidentally, the model will try to reply to a handle. Look at the clipboard chip in the keyboard before you hit generate. If it is the wrong string, copy the actual message.

Full Access also means the keyboard can use the network for generation. That is required. It is also why we tell people not to paste authentication codes into the same session. Instagram login codes are not conversation context.

Close Friends, broadcasts, and the audience problem

Close Friends stories invite a more private register than a public story, but they are still not WhatsApp family planning. People overshare in CF and then freeze on the reply because the intimacy feels high. Neutral or Agree, short, specific. Do not generate a therapy paragraph unless they asked a direct question. Broadcast channels are one-way until someone DMs; treat inbound DMs from a broadcast as stranger DMs with a topic already chosen by the last post.

Comment-to-DM funnels are another visual-context trap. Someone comments fire on a reel and you reply in DMs. The clipboard might hold the comment, not the reel hook. Copy both into a stub if you need the model to mention the hook. Otherwise you will thank them for fire, which is content-free.

A day in the visual inbox

You wake up to twelve story replies that are just emojis. Some want a conversation; most do not. Generate Continue only for the two that asked a question. Midday a reel commenter DMs how do you get clients. That is a pointer, not a memoir: Agree, one link or one next question, stop. Evening a match from another app continues on Instagram. Switch to Dating. Night a friend sends a photo with no caption. You cannot generate against empty clipboard. Type a five-word stub about the photo, generate, send.

That last case is the one a separate chatbot fails too, unless you upload the image. We are a keyboard. We will not pretend we OCR'd the story. The honest product is short, specific text, edited against what you saw with your eyes.

Notes and prompts inside Instagram change yearly. The constant is the keyboard field. If it is a text field, KOPY can insert. If Instagram is showing only a reaction tray, there is nothing to insert into. Do not fight the tray. Open the reply field, then generate.

Reels comments are a third surface: public under the video, then often a DM if they reply to your comment. Copy the comment you are answering, not the video title. Keep the public comment short enough that it still works as a screenshot under the reel. If the next beat needs logistics or flirt, take it to DMs and change register the way this page already splits story versus DM.

If your actual problem is family group speed, that is KOPY for WhatsApp. If it is public-thread risk, that is KOPY for Twitter/X. Instagram is the visual-context, short-message, story-to-DM product. Keep the drafts that small.