HeliBoard with Swipe + FUTO have made replacing gboard possible for me. I feel like it’s been a 90% replacement, a far greater degree than some of the decent keyboards currently available. I regularly use but swipe and speech to text in two languages. I’m really really happy and grateful for these tools. 💜
How do you get your microphone option in the top right corner like that. Mine only shows up under the toolbar menu, after hitting the arrow key (top left corner)
Here’s another one then: in heliboard settings, got to about, and hit “Description of hidden features.” It’s where I found that, plus a few more neat tricks!
Am I understanding correctly, you can swipe in two languages without hitting a “switch language” button like on Gboard? If so I may have to make the switch
Unfortunately no. That’s remains part of the 10% that this solution doesn’t replicate 1:1. But… you can use a spacebar gesture (e.g. vertical swipe) to quickly change languages. Works like a charm.
Oh my goodness yes! I say punctuations constantly out of habit and then have to edit them out. But I’m also really impressed with FUTOs ability to determine punctuation based on pauses.
Yes, don’t get me wrong, it is very, very, good. However I want full control over the characters being entered. I had thought that’s what “verbose” mode was going to be, but honestly I can’t figure out what that is.
this is great. I’ve been looking for a gboard replacement for so long
minor thing: how do i import my personal dictionary from gboard? the github page says something about .dict files but gboard exported a zip with a .txt file
Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with importing and exporting personal dictionaries. I looked into it a bit, but wasn’t successful in finding anything relevant.
This is the definitive replacement for gboard, people. It works fantastically well already with everything that Gboard has and it will only get better from here on.
Idk about layouts but swipe is available if you look into it, you just need to download a file to load the it into the keyboard and yes on clipboard history
If you’re satisfied with it, you don’t need to update. But Openboard lacks a lot of features many people want. The biggest of them is probably the glide typing, which Heliboard supports. And it also added a lot of quality of life improvements.
Some new features, bug fixes, and ongoing support.
It is a new application so you do have to set it up fresh - don’t switch until you have a bit of spare time. Missed the back and restore button in settings.
Personally I’m on one of the fork’s beta versions. I’m waiting for the f-droid release so I get updates.
I started learning Japanese as I started using Heliboard, for now I just swap back when I need it. GBoard doesn’t play nice with the language button switching between apps so I just use the OS keyboard button and have the language button disabled everywhere, which also frees up some space!
Is this better in any way tohan florisboard? I’ve been using it (florisboard) for a year now and had no problems and have loved its features (especially the text navigation arrows and clipboard history).
Been using this for about 3 months or so. The one piece missing is good swipe word recognition - its really poor compared to Gboard even after this amount of time. I spend more time correcting words than I saved nor typing them. Used swipe with Gboard for many years previously so I know hope swipe works.
What it has forced me to do now is to actually try to be close to the letters. When I’m swiping with gboard, I was very sloppy and it would recognize what I wrote. At this point, I’m fine being more accurate for the tradeoff.
I have to admit that gboard is pretty amazing at the detecting my sloppiness. But… knowing everything I type and say is going to Google… well, let’s just says I’m willing to tolerate the extra work so as to keep things away from them.
FUTO is definitely slower than Google’s speech to text engine, but for the same reason… I think I’m completely okay with that now.
I’ve turned off network access for Gboard and have the offline speech recognition installed. This is why I have Helioboard + FUTO installed but don’t use them, as they don’t yet exceed an offline Gboard in function.
Dang. I use TrackerControl to do just that for many apps and hadn’t even thought about trying to do it for gboard + gvoice because I had not know they had offline processing available for both.
Now its tempting to switch back and see… 😬 but… so far this combo of HeliBoard with swipe and FUTO have been sooo close… and its not google. 😏
In Gboard settings, under voice typing, it is the faster voice typing toggle. That brings the voice recognition library onto your device rather than using data. The only thing that does not work in Gboard after disabling network access is the gif search.
I extensively use glide typing when not using voice, and as you’ll see from other comments on this post the glide typing is not so great on Helioboard.
And… I do kind of prefer Gboard’s style of voice to text where I voice all of the punctuation. Pausing and thinking about what you are going to say using FUTO means it tends to end a sentence.
Yeah, I’m having to tolerate a whole bunch for this next best solution, but it’s far from perfect.
It seems you and I have near identical usage style and when the same pet peeve, so I completely understand why you use it the way you do. I’m quite terrible and very very slow at typing normally. When I watch my kids text, it literally boggles my mind. It simply is impossible for me.
@uninvitedguest I decided to give try to gboard+trackercontrol. Internet access is now offfl. It blocks tenor as expected and the offline swipe seems to work as desired. (Which means light-years ahead of any other swipe I’ve used)
What I cannot tell is if the voice input truly is offline. I had always presumed that Gboard was relying on “Google Voice Typing” integration, but I have that keyboard disabled. I still feel wildly uncomfortable using voice with gboard. How is it so accurate without going online?
Any thoughts on how to ensure gboard voice is also 100% blocked?
Thanks, it doesn’t really matter, as long as it gets there eventually. I just don’t want to have to check for updates manually. Thanks again. I really appreciate it!
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