Switched to this a couple weeks ago. I’m used to swipe typing on gboard. Unfortunately the swipe typing on FUTO is nowhere near useable for me yet. The accuracy is horrendous, and much of the time it just gives up on inputting any word at all.
Unfortunately swiping on Gboard has been my main method of typing for more than a decade. I’m so accustomed to it that I can type full sentences without even looking at my phone.
So in an effort to improve my privacy (by discontinuing my use of a piece of keylogging spyware as a keyboard) I’ve sacrificed the speed of swipe typing. Everything takes much longer to type now. Worth it? I guess I’ll keep trying for a month or so and decide then.
Have you tried Heliboard? It’s open and has swyping (you have to download a binary blob).
Yeah I tried swipe typing on FUTO keyboard too and was very disappointed, went back to the absolutely stellar Heliboard. It’s definitely as good as Apple’s swipe typing, especially after a few weeks of use.
To be fair the FUTO keyboard is still in Alpha and they plan to improve this specifically. I’ll keep an eye on it as it matures.
I use heliboard with futo for voice to text. Works pretty well. Best voice to text one used. Picks up on proper punctuation without having to say it.
Where do you get the blob?
https://github.com/erkserkserks/openboard/tree/master/app/src/main/jniLibs
You probably want the v8a one
Thanks!
Just FYI you can use a firewall app on device to block Gboard internet access.
It can communicate via play services if you have that
Any more information on this?
Agreed. From what I can tell the swiping is inaccurate as you have to touch each letter perfectly for it to register where as on gboard being near to or adjacent to a letter is sufficient for it to guess the correct word
FUTO is the greatest use of on-device LLM so far. It never gets anything wrong, even my thought markers “…”
Ya I’m using the English 79 model (not the default) voice on a pixel 8 and it works very well.
I had switched to HeliBoard in order to de-Google as much as possible. I’m not militant about it, but if there’s an alternative I’ll take it.
Decided to try out FUTO because I felt like I was missing swipe typing. And it’s good. But for me it’s just too much. It turns out I didn’t really miss swipe typing, and (possibly just a me issue) that extra feature was making FUTO much less responsive than Heliboard. So back I went.
I guess for me, simple and fast is more important than replicating my old Gboard experience. But each person is different.
Heliboard has swipe typing? Just go to the settings and tap on “Gesture Typing”. I believe you have to download a proprietary library for it, though.
You can add swipe (glide?) typing into HeliBoard. From their github readme:
- Glide typing (only with closed source library ☹️)
- library not included in the app, as there is no compatible open source library available
- can be extracted from GApps packages (“swypelibs”), or downloaded here (click on the file and then “raw” or the tiny download button)
The only reason HeliBoard doesn’t include this themselves is presumably legal liability plus their dedication to the app not having any network permissions at all.
- Glide typing (only with closed source library ☹️)
I’ve had no responsive issues with FUTO so far, just the occasional typo from the ever so slightly different layout.
Just learned about heliboard. Thank you! Wrote this with that keyboard and glide enabled as the others have said. Loving it!
I though it was against the rules to post about proprietary software
https://gitlab.futo.org/keyboard/latinime
Debatable how “proprietary” it really is.
It isn’t foss so it is a toss. You can’t do much with the source code. It is the same as the Windows XP source code
Whats the general opinion about AnySoftKeyboard?
Just donated last night. I’ve been using this keyboard for the past month. I switched over from gboard. While I’ve never really used speech to text I’m just glad that this keyboard is so privacy focused. You can swap out the llms too if it fits your style
Any idea what languages this keyboard support? I can’t use any open source keyboard yet as all doesn’t have good multi lingual support and typing.
Have you tried HeliBoard? I think it has the best multilingual support for all these FOSS keyboards, but mind you, you have to manually load the dictionaries for the languages you want, and same thing for the swipe libraries, but it’s all documented and linked on the GitHub page.
It has alot of languages. Depending on what your looking for the voice is good the options are nice. Pair it with openboard and its a gem.
Checking this out now! So far I like it. Only think I lose from using Gboard is the access to gifs, but I can work around that.
Privacy wise you should really have internet disabled for Gboard anyways which already disables the gif functionality.
Signal has privacy-friendly GIF access.
Gonna give it a shot. Can’t be any worse than the default Android Keeb
It’s good. I use it. Whoever made it did a great job.
It’s fairly good. I find the autocorrect to be poor and result in a much lower typing speed though.
I like the idea of the keyboard being offline and the LLM stuff but so far I can’t see a way for multi language input. I’m guessing it’s too early in the alpha state for that but I will keep an eye open for it, it is a promising project. In the meantime I’ll test the heliboard others were mentioning.
No keyboard besides SwiftKey and gboard have accented characters for devanagari script.
Every opensource one is a dealbreaker, and i dont know how to fix it myself.
I use a FUTO voice and Helio keyboard combo by just calling FUTO from Helio when I want to dictate. Works great for me. I tried the FUTO keyboard and it works well enough but not quite as well as Helio for me. Still contribute money, though, because I like where they are headed.
You can use Transcribro also. It uses the same tech for voice to text.
I love Heliboard, but this is already giving me much better autocorrect, I’m not finding myself actively avoiding typing from my phone now, so it’s a win to me
I haven’t ventured past the stock keyboard in a long while. What’s the status on swipe typing on foss android keyboards? I want to switch away from the stock oem keyboard app
