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.
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
These are the 4 Freedoms of open source software - which OSE applies to open source hardware and other products in general. These are the freedoms to inspect, use, modify, and sell.
<span style="color:#323232;">> The freedom to inspect or view. In software, this came from the freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish . Access to the source code is a precondition for this - such as FreeCAD files, text documents, spreadsheets, calculations, instructions, etc.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">The freedom to use. Run or otherwise execute the software, product, or process. You may be charged for using the thing. But this is a moot point, because as soon as someone buys it, it can be released for free.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">The freedom to modify. This is a big point: making improvements or adaptation is a key to distributing value.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Economic freedom. The freedom to distribute or sell. Freedom distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
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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.
I used AnySoftKeyboard and Florisboard before switching to FUTO They’re both good, but swipe typing is still experimental on both of them. FUTO’s swipe typing is more accurate, and speech-to-text is faster, which is why I personally switched. The one thing I feel AnysoftKeyboard does better is the ability to scroll through suggested words, while FUTO only displays a maximum of 3.
I’ve tried it, and it’s quite good and heavily customisable, but a pain in the arse if you want to use more than one language. I think their Dutch version doesn’t even work if I recall correctly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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