37 ms·

FUTO Keyboard

346 points by richardboegli 2y ago

RecycledEle 2y ago
Remember that every single thing offered in the past as "not wiretappable" was put out by someone who was wiretapping everyone who used it.
factorialboy 2y ago
It seems impossible to uninstall Gboard on my Android device, but I figured out how to make FUTO the default. Weirdly opening the FUTO keyboard app makes Gboard the default, but hey, I know how to switch. And yes, FUTO is absolutely worth it. Love the customizability for touch typing and the voice tying works great for me.
deleted 2y ago
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brokenmachine 2y ago
Does it support alternative keyboard layouts such as Dvorak?
SomniusX 2y ago
I've tried to setup FUTO with English as primary, added externally imported voice model, dictionary and engine and then added a secondary language (Greek) that I've only being able to add the external voice model. I've been able to voice dictate in Greek but no suggestions or other features The worst part I wanted to be noted is the keyboard layout switching method, in order for me as a user to press and hold the space and then while having one or two hands focused on the lower end of the device I need to reach out to the top to select the language by hand. I would suggest implemented a different approach via Spacebar slide left/right or even a dedicated keyboard layout switch button. After all that see if dictionary files can really be imported cause tar/gz or other archive files aren't working thru import. Last I'd like to thank the developers of FUTO keyboard, I'll keep trying to replace SwiftKey with FUTO and when it l'll gets ripe I'll also jump on the donation / payment to the cause. Keep it up !!
thih9 2y ago
> Your contribution ensures FUTO Keyboard remains ad-free and fully functional. I would prefer an upfront cost and one that makes the product sustainable - instead of a free product with the danger of enshitification.
- zvmaz 2y ago
  I did not read it as a "threat".
- RadiozRadioz 2y ago
  With other FUTO products they ask that you buy them, but also give away the source. Perhaps they could use that model here as well.
  - logicprog 2y ago
    They do, they keyboard's source is available from their gitlab and you're allowed to copy, modify, and redistribute it, as long as you don't remove the section in the app that lets people pay them and don't sell your derivative works. Sort of a CC-BY-SA-NC deal. Seems fair enough to me — not ideally FOSS, but something I can live with. There are few things I use anymore that aren't totally FOSS but I do compromise sometimes if all of quality, ease of use, security, and privacy gain and the loss in perfect freedom is small enough.
- wmf 2y ago
  If nobody pays they won't introduce ads; they'll more likely just go out of business.
  - vdfs 2y ago
    Why an offline keyboard would go out of business? They can just stop development or keep it at bare minimum at worst cases. It's more likely this would be sold to an other company if it get popular.
    - skeledrew 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
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josephcsible 2y ago
The license: https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/latinime/-/blob/master/LICENSE.md https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/latinime/-/blob/master/LICENSE.... Concerning parts: > You may use [...] the software only for non-commercial purposes > You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge > you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software related to payment to the Licensor ---- Also, the button that says "Download from F-Droid" is super misleading. It's actually downloading it from a third-party repo that happens to be compatible with the F-Droid app, but it sure makes it sound like you're going to download it from F-Droid's repo.
- bogwog 2y ago
  What point are you trying to make by quoting the license?
  - josephcsible 2y ago
    That it's not even close to FOSS, and that you're not allowed to make it stop harassing you for money.
    - logicprog 2y ago
      It doesn't harass you for money, what? The option to pay just lives in a section tucked away in the settings page, and the "yes I've already paid" button works on the honor system anyway.
      - josephcsible 2y ago
        > It doesn't harass you for money, what? The option to pay just lives in a section tucked away in the settings page, Are you sure? https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/latinime/-/blob/9f70a84dc85830d0bdf9e584e7b4f6f3a3603585/java/src/org/futo/inputmethod/latin/uix/settings/pages/Payment.kt#L206-256 https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/latinime/-/blob/9f70a84dc85830d... seems to indicate otherwise. > and the "yes I've already paid" button works on the honor system anyway. Then what's the license key for that you get when you pay?
Electrolux 2y ago
saying "download from fdroid" and pointing to your private repo is the shittiest thing anyone can do. it's the same as linking to your .exe or .img and saying "get it from microsoft/apple". no it's not. you are just using those platforms ability to handle links and extension of functionality. it is in no way the validation from those platforms that wording like they do imply
- NikkiA 2y ago
  I don't even understand what I'm supposed to do with that QR code, f-droid has no ability to add a repo from QR code that I can see, so I have to type in the fingerprint manually?
- newsclues 2y ago
  For sounds like the right word not from.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- alex-futo 2y ago
  The wording was not intentionally construed to imply anything of the sort. It's been updated now to say "with" instead of "from"
- MrOwen 2y ago
  What about software you download from a third party yum or apt repo? You would still say you're getting it from yum/apt, albeit not from a red hat or canonical hosted yum/apt repo. Same for f-droid. They're just called f-droid repos and the biggest repo that currently exists is also run by f-droid.
- Sateallia 2y ago
  That's more on F-Droid, no? If someone said "Download from Cydia", I would not expect it to download it from Saurik's official repository called "Cydia/Telesphoreo". Using the same name for the app (store kit) and the repository is just a bad design choice, especially if the reference implementation comes with only the said repository.
bpev 2y ago
How is multilingual support? Because I feel like this is usually the thing that I find to be quite poor in smaller company keyboards, and I don't see anything on their landing page. Edit: specifically for non-roman chars ala chinese or japanese is where I tend to see gaps
- bjoli 2y ago
  Typing jn english is fine. Typing in Swedish is not. The auto correct is pretty bad. I haven't tried German yet. I will probably continue using it just to see where it goes.
- tjpnz 2y ago
  Doesn't seem to support it and it's not for lack of trying either. Such a shame as it will make it difficult to use Japanese sites and interact with my wife when she decides to switch language.
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2y ago
  For the voice input it works perfectly well in French. For simultaneous multilingual typing I don't think it's currently supported but I'm thinking we will soon seen a finetuned transformer for multilingual text prediction as well as a multilingual dictionary and that would solve it.
- stavros 2y ago
  Switching keyboards is a huge hassle. Instead of just a swipe on the spacebar, you have to long-press the spacebar, a window pops up, you select your language there, and possibly press "ok" (I'm not sure on the last one). Just a complete non-starter, as far as language support goes.
freedomben 2y ago
I think this is a cool idea, and is something I would pay for, but I'm concerned about the (lack of) openness. It's a lot harder than I would prefer to figure out these factoids for example: 1. FUTO Keyboard is licensed "FUTO Source First License 1.0" 2. FUTO Keyboard is a fork of the AOSP keyboard (called LatinIME). LatinIME is open source, Apache licensed. 3. The source code is here: https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/latinime/ https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/latinime/ I'm not an open source purist, but the more central/fundamental the project is to my life/workflow, the more important that becomes to me. A keyboard is pretty fundamental. I'd love to have an open source keyboard that is good, especially with good speech to text (it drives me crazy how Google continually changes the behavior of STT on the Pixel 8. I get the philosophy behind incremental improvement, but it's a continual stream of two steps forward, one step backward, one forward, two backward, three forward, etc. Just as I learn the quirks and how to work around them, it all changes and there's all new quirks to learn and workaround. Maddening). It's still early days, but this an interesting project to keep an eye on!
- sleepycatgirl 2y ago
  Oh yea, anything FUTO is not open source. Its merely source available.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
    That's what open source is. I have the application and I have the source code.
    - sleepycatgirl 2y ago
      Nope. It restricts modifications one can do, and how to distribute it. There is quite a stark difference between source available, and open source.
      - praveenperera 2y ago
        You can modify however you want, you just can't turn around and sell it.
logicprog 2y ago
I saw this from the Louis Rossmann video and have been trying it out for the past couple hours — in fact I'm actually dictating this message with it right now — and honestly, it seems pretty great! Certainly much higher quality and more reliable than the version of Google Voice Dictation that I was using (sandboxed without network access) on GraphineOS previously, which would crash regularly and had only passable voice dictation quality. My only problem is that it doesn't seem to let you speak punctuation marks, so it's sort of hard to get my sentences punctuated the way I want them to be. The keyboard itself is also very high quality; it seems to have a really highly polished interface and a pretty good number of features and options, almost competing with openboard!
- pcdoodle 2y ago
  Awesome, thanks for sharing your experience with it. I like what FUTO is doing.
- privacyking 2y ago
  With the punctuation marks have you tried enabling symbols dictation?
  - logicprog 2y ago
    I did, but it didn't seem to do anything?
vile_wretch 2y ago
No comments about the product really but an iPhone as a placeholder device on their website is an odd choice.
- ivanjermakov 2y ago
  Although it does look similar to an iPhone, that's how all flagship smartphones look in 2024...
- jitl 2y ago
  As an iPhone user I was confused to see my device, scroll down, then all the app stores listed were Android! (Although other than source-availability the other features come on the standard iPhone keyboard)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
rom1v 2y ago
What are private and open source keyboards on Android? I use [OpenBoard](https://f-droid.org/fr/packages/org.dslul.openboard.inputmethod.latin/ https://f-droid.org/fr/packages/org.dslul.openboard.inputmet...), but there is no update since 2022 (it works well though).
- skeledrew 2y ago
  Heliboard works really great, but for swiping you need to manually add Google's lib (which I did), and support for alternative language layouts is very basic (if that's something you need).
  - rom1v 2y ago
    Oh, thank you. https://alternativeto.net/software/heliboard/about/ https://alternativeto.net/software/heliboard/about/ > HeliBoard is a fork of OpenBoard, continuing the project from where it stopped.
  - privacyking 2y ago
    Futo keyboard has much better word prediction
    - skeledrew 2y ago
      It's nice, but I've gotten too used to seeing the long-press keys in my previous keyboards, and having a number row. Let's see how the layout for other languages (mainly Japanese) shake out though.
      - privacyking 2y ago
        That was the first thing I enabled. The option to show the symbols isn't the bottom of the theme settings
        skeledrew 2y ago
        Interesting. Still no number row, but much better. And having voice input integrated means that I can remove the dedicated app. Still really just missing Japanese keyboard layout support.
dvh 2y ago
The only reason I'm unhappy with gboard are the constant updates. And as I'm typing now I see that the predicted words are often wrong compared to gboard and occasionally i get 1s lag. It's borderline unusable, not because of the lag but because of the inferior predictions.
madspindel 2y ago
No iOS version?
Sytten 2y ago
Personnaly been using the open source AnySoftKeyboard for the past 8 years without issue. It is very flexible so I am wondering what that brings really to the table. They could have sponsored AnySoftKeyboard instead.
- lowkey 2y ago
  Both are privacy-focused open-source keyboards, the difference is that FUTO Keyboards also includes a polished voice-input capability designed for dictation and speech-to-text functionality that is also fully-offline capable and built on top of Whisper models. I don't believe AnySoftKeyboard offers this capability but I could be mistaken.
  - josephcsible 2y ago
    Of the two, only AnySoftKeyboard is open-source.
    - lowkey 2y ago
      Correction: only AnySoftKeyboard is open source according to the 0SI definition – an organization that famously did not invent the term open source but co-opted it from Christine Peterson, and which is primarily funded by closed source tech giants, such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft who are wildly conflicted in their interest as they profit heavily from open source software, according to the current definition while contributing virtually nothing back. Coincidence? I think not.
      - growse 2y ago
        > according to the current definition while contributing virtually nothing back. This argument looks a bit silly when even the most cursory research would reveal that many major and widely-used open source projects are most significantly contributed to by people working for these "closed source tech giants".
  - kragen 2y ago
okso 2y ago
Finally a voice recognition keyboard that works well on Android and offline! I just tested it and the quality in English at least is great. Too bad that the license is not open-source, I prefer donating to projects that are open-source even if asking for a fee to use (ex: Netguard, MyExpenses).
- MrOwen 2y ago
  ?? https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/latinime https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/latinime Isn't that the whole point of futo? Paid for open source software?
  - josephcsible 2y ago
    It's not open-source, just source-available. Check the license.
    - lowkey 2y ago
      Correction, it isn’t open-source according to the definition of opensource.org - an organization that famously did not invent the term but just co-opted it and whose primary source of funding comes from private closed-source tech giants such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft - a clear and very serious conflict of interest.
      - Brian_K_White 2y ago
        You keep going on about them not inventing the term, as though that matters. They din't invent it, they proposed a formal definition, and other people agreed, and have been using the term to mean that meaning for decades by now. You can't change the meaning to suit yourself at this point after other people have already used it. That would be changing other people's words. You can't very well accuse OSI or anyone else of the crime of presumtion while being willing to do that. "did not invent the term" is just a totally pointless and silly thing to even think about or say. It's as silly as saying that Websters didn't invent the words they write down definitions for.
lowkey 2y ago
I haven't personally used the FUTO keyboard since it is Android-only and I am on an iPhone, but I do want to share some context on FUTO.org as it is a fantastic group with an inspiring mission.to provide decentralized alternatives to the tech oligopoly. The have funded development of Signal, Louis Rossman's Right to Repair Advocacy, Trieve.ai - the YC 2024 open-source AI-powered search platform, TOR project, GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, KiCAD, VLC, Zulip, Blender, FFmpeg, GIMP, KeePassX, PeerTube, Free Software Foundation, NeoVIM, Lichess, GitLab, and many many more. The company doesn't promote itself heavily so you have to deep-dive to truly understand their impact, but it is significant. It was founded and funded by a developer and entrepreneur who sold his company to Yahoo back in the day, ran Yahoo Games for a while and then took his considerable resources and moved to Austin, TX where he built an amazing ecosystem around decentralized technology. I am not directly affiliated with FUTO but I know them because they host free lunches for decentralized tech enthusiasts every Friday on their campus in Austin, which I regularly attend as do some notable figures from the open-source, decentralized tech and privacy-forward community such as the CTO of Signal, CalyxOS and others. If you are ever in Austin on a Friday I encourage you to come check out a FUTO lunch to be inspired, meet friendly folks and talk about our decentralized future. Lunch details are posted on their Zulip chat, available from FUTO.org
- nickorlow 2y ago
  They donated to Asahi Linux too :)
GaggiX 2y ago
Some interesting technology behind the voice recognition: https://github.com/futo-org/whisper-acft https://github.com/futo-org/whisper-acft
skeledrew 2y ago
I've been using their Voice Input for a few months now and really like it. My only issue is that it buffers the input and then spews it all when you stop speaking, but I guess that helps the model to be more contextually accurate. I hope their Keyboard is as good and provides decent multilingual support. Currently using Heliboard, and have to switch to a broken GO Keyboard install (dictionary is missing), that failed to properly clone from my previous device, whenever I want to type Japanese.
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2y ago
  The fact that you have to wait the end of the 30 seconds before it starts writing the text is a fundamental limitation of the current transformer algorithm because the first and the last bits of speech influence each other so you have to wait until the end.
  - skeledrew 2y ago
    Yeah I get that. I tried another open source voice input that was real time and the quality was horrible. But this is something that can be worked around for Whisper. One thing that comes to mind is an option to append and reprocess the audio every few centiseconds (needs a fairly powerful device though), and update the text output as needed. This could also open the door for an edit-by-voice feature.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
7e 2y ago
Which modern keyboards do connect to the Internet? The Apple and Google keyboards, AFACT, use private federated learning to keep their vocabularies up to date with the latest trending topics. I don’t think this solves a problem I have, unless the offline dictation is somehow much better than the best big tech has to offer.
- threwawasy1228 2y ago
  There are numerous issues with the 'privacy-preserving' federated learning models that are used by Google and Apple. They have constantly been called out by privacy researchers and cryptographers due to their misuse of differential privacy. There is very little trust in the privacy-preserving measures that are being used by these companies. This is not to say that these methods are bad in general but in terms of how they are used by Google and Apple, they amount to little more than a PR stunt. There are numerous reconstruction attacks on their privacy protocols as used by things like GBoard.
- nulld3v 2y ago
  GBoard does kinda "keylog" in the telemetry it sends (actually, it's more "wordlog"): https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/gboard_kamil.pdf https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/gboard_kamil.pdf It will also do this even if you block the keyboard's internet access as it will use Google Play Services to send the telemetry data. Previously discussed in this deleted reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ymo3r9/deleted_by_user/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ymo3r9/deleted_by_... At least turning off the "Share usage statistics" option in Gboard settings actually does opt you out...
  - privacyking 2y ago
    Do you have a source for that? Where it sends through play services if network access is disabled? What does it send specifically?
    - yencabulator 2y ago
      Read the linked PDF.
traeumerei 2y ago
[dead]
BlackLotus89 2y ago
So I tested every open source keyboard a while back and was thouroughly disappointed with every solution. (tested for swipe, word prediction/text prediction, language support, "coding" support, size, speed [yes there are slow Keyboards]) Switched back to asop. This keyboard is over a 100MB as well, BUT it's the first keyboard where I get the additional size. I habe to check if this is "open source enough" for my needs but glancing over the comments it seems to be completly source available at least which is great. If this turns out to be a decent keyboard I only need an open source text to speech solution and I'm golden. Edit: tried the keyboard and I failed in adding the dictionaries I downloaded. And I failed to find language models for other languages, but the keyboard seems nice at first glance. Have to try it on a low end device to see how it really performs, but I could live with this Edit2: oof seems a bit heavy. Phone feels warmer and battery usage reported by Android is kinda high. Have to throughly test the different settings and see how it affects battery life Edit3: so the voice recognition is okish. If you don't say anything and press the circle it hallucinates something and it's a bit annoying that it only prints out the text after you are done talking, but it is usable. Now I need the ability to transcribe voice messages I get using whisper as well :) Edit4: OK text prediction is really bad right now. I saw a function to learn from my typing behaviour (with the "eats batteries" warning attached), but hopefully it will get better through this
- bgoated01 2y ago
  I tested several open source keyboards last year looking for a way to get rid of the distracting gif search in gboard, and was also very disappointed and went back to gboard. After trying this one for just a couple minutes, this looks much more usable than those I tried last time. I don't use voice texting, and mostly just need decent swiping and prediction. I'm hoping this will meet those needs!
  - BlackLotus89 2y ago
    Of you are looking for swipe support only AOSP and and AnySoft gave good results for me. There certainly are some other swipe keyboards, but most feel broken. FUTOs swipe also feels great
627467 2y ago
Any keyboard incapable of simultaneously (without switching) support multiple languages is a deal breaker for me... Unfortunately it seems like gboard is the only one that supports this
- sho_hn 2y ago
  How does that work? (I use Gboard with English and Korean and have to switch.)
  - somethingsaid 2y ago
    I’m on iPhone, using English and Dutch with the built in keyboard and it’s pretty seamless. Basically the layout doesn’t change (it’s always qwerty) but it will detect the language I’m typing and spell check for that language. That might only be possible/easy for languages with a (mostly) common alphabet. Edit: there’s also a button to force the language if I want to override it. It also seems to read the text on screen or remember what apps use what language as it will auto-select the right language most of the time.
  - lambda 2y ago
    It works when using multiple languages that share the same writing system (the Latin alphabet). It means that you have a single keyboard, but the words that swipe or auto complete are from more than one language; generally the predictive nature means that when you switch languages it's pretty good at predicting future words are from the same language. It also means things like you get all the diacritics from all of the languages when you long press. I was studying French, while also working with several Polish people, so I set my keyboard to simultaneously English, French, and Polish, and then I was able to do French lessons without switching, and also able to write my Polish coworkers names easily.
- namtab00 2y ago
  SwiftKey does too..
- therein 2y ago
  One of the main reasons I won't switch to iOS.
nightpool 2y ago
Kind of a side note, but why does every Zulip chat require a different email/password? Especially to even see the chatroom? It's really frustrating for every Zulip chat I've tried to join. We wouldn't even need server-to-server federation to fix this, even simply using a Google login would go a long way to help make these chats more accessible.
- tabbott 2y ago
  Just a quick correction: Zulip supports logging in with your Google account (as well as GitHub, GitLab and Apple): https://zulip.com/help/configure-authentication-methods https://zulip.com/help/configure-authentication-methods. In Zulip Cloud, those options are enabled by default, but chat.futo.org is a self-hosted system, and I assume they either haven't done the setup work (getting API keys, etc.) for those authentication methods, or don't want to for policy reasons. As to why every organization has its own accounts, each organization has different people administering/controlling them, and separate accounts for different Zulip organizations is a lot cleaner of a security model, both for business customers but also for projects that are paranoid or opinionated about authentication options. That said, we are planning to create a Zulip Cloud SSO option that would allow users in the many communities that aren't picky about authentication to use a single login for all their Zulip Cloud organizations. Feedback on how exactly you'd like to see that work is appreciated, especially in #feedback on https://chat.zulip.org https://chat.zulip.org, where it'd have the most visibility within our project. Open organizations can also set any channel to be publicly accessible without logging in, which I'd expect to be useful for something like FUTO: https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option.
  - nightpool 2y ago
    Thanks, but I understand that Zulip is technically capable of all of these things—that doesn't change the fact that it's still a very, very common frustration any time an org links to their Zulip channels. So it's clear that the additional setup required to go through Google auth review, get API tokens, test the integration, etc is just not feasible or reasonable to expect for many self-hosted admins. > That said, we are planning to create a Zulip Cloud SSO option that would allow users in the many communities that aren't picky about authentication to use a single login for all their Zulip Cloud organizations Would this be easy and accessible for self-hosted installs? e.g., can self-hosted installs now use Zulip Cloud auth out of the box with no further setup? Maybe even have it enabled by default for open organizations? That seems to be the biggest problem with the existing social login schemes. Defaults matter a lot, and if Zulip continues to ship with "Slack-like" defaults instead of "Discord-like" defaults, it's going to continue to be just as frustrating to see Zulip links on org websites. > Open organizations can also set any channel to be publicly accessible without logging in, which I'd expect to be useful for something like FUTO: https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option. Again, I understand that this capability exists, but it's very complicated for administrators to enable, and requires an explicit opt in for EVERY individual channel that is made public in this way, which means in practice it's very rare. Having a good web-public organization requires a long list of steps: 1. manually editing the server config files to enable the feature. 2. having an administrator enable the option for the org. 3. having individual users remember to set channels as web-public every time they create them. 4. having an administrator audit popular channels and make sure they're set to web-public if necessary I think many organizations would be better served with a "public channels are web-public by default" option that does NOT require editing config files or manually changing settings for every individual channel. The distinction between "this channel is public and anybody can sign up for an account to read it" and "this channel is public and anybody can read it" is very, very slight and while I can see the value of making that distinction on an org level, I do not expect 95% of open-source orgs to have the policies / guidance necessary to enable users to confidently make a fine-grained distinction on a channel by channel level. This means that the distinction between public and web-public adds a lot of cognitive overhead and basically leads users to choose between those privacy types at random, unless their org has a "all channels must be web-public" or similar policy (like rust-lang does). In fact, checking the docs now, it looks like normal users can't even create web-public channels, so other orgs can't even replicate rust's policy without restricting who is allowed to create channels. Unfortunately, both of these features fall prey to very common open source UX traps—having a bad out of the box experience (no SSO) ruin a user's first impression of your project, and having too many customization options, leading to user confusion on which settings to use when.
crossroadsguy 2y ago
Not to diss on this keyboard but does this even matter on the standard Android OS (not a custom ROM) (and do we even know this about iOS)? Every single thing you do or don't do is tracked and sent anyway.
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2y ago
  I think it matters greatly because currently even if you have a custom ROM on Android you still don't have a choice for offline speech recognition. For me I'm on grapheneOS and was still stuck without speech recognition until FUTO uploaded this. This keyboard is awesome and I paid for it 10 minutes after paying for it.
disqard 2y ago
This looks pretty polished. Does anyone else here use MessageEase?
- velox_neb 2y ago
  I do, for over a decade. Hope it doesn't die. Can't fathom how people live with these tiny qwerty keyboards on a touchscreen.
  - wilted-iris 2y ago
    There's an open source reimplantation in case the original stops working: https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key
- xigoi 2y ago
  I did. When it got enshittified, I switched to Unexpected Keyboard with a custom layout (it supports MessagEese-style 8-directional swipe keys).
pitaj 2y ago
Very cool! Some things missing from Gboard: - clipboard suggestions - emoji search - gif search - stickers - Bitmoji integration
- tentacleuno 2y ago
  Emoji search is one of the reasons why I still use GBoard, to be honest. None of the open-source offerings seem to have it.
kragen 2y ago
noncommercial use only: https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/latinime/-/blob/master/LICENSE.md https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/latinime/-/blob/master/LICENSE....
nh2 2y ago
SwiftKey is clever in that it corrects depending on where you press in the key: If I type "Akk" it corrects it to "All" only if I pressed the "k" on its right side (near the "L" key); if I pressed it further left, it keeps "Akk". That works really well. Can FUTO do that too?
- 2StepsOutOfLine 2y ago
  Tangentially, I think I may have developed some bad habits and muscle memory from relying on features like this when typing on android. So much so that when typing using FUTO's keyboard I ended up just getting frustrated at all the misspelling and went back to native.
  - nh2 2y ago
    Not convinced it's "bad habits"; it just seems FUTO can improve a bit here. For example, today I typed "I'm not sure bit"; SwiftKey reliably corrects that to "I'm not sure but" (I believe even without any local learning) and FUTO doesn't. "I'm not sure bit" is just a very unlikely sentence, and I believe any Markov chain model should easily correct that.
    - nh2 2y ago
      I filed a couple such common cases here: https://github.com/futo-org/android-keyboard/issues/102#issuecomment-2198757251 https://github.com/futo-org/android-keyboard/issues/102#issu...
- torginus 2y ago
  I really miss physical keyboards. This issue only occurs because we're poor at controlly which part of our big sausage fingers actually make contact with the screen. The world used to be full of sliding phones with dedicated keyboards, but for some reason every manufacturer is content making the same glass rectangle. It's like we created a problem and are trying to solve that problem with technology, instead of not creating the problem in the first place.
infogulch 2y ago
Normal typing and dictation is pretty good, but the swipe mode (my preference) is unusably bad.
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2y ago
  I don't share your experience, to me it's fine and perfectly usable
- rycomb 2y ago
  I agree. I really hope that they improve it.
vedmed 2y ago
really nice but lacking a numberpad do people really type numbers using a number row?
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2y ago
  Yes!
geokon 2y ago
How do you check an app is offline without combing through the source code..?
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2y ago
  You can see if it asks for network access right? You can even revoke it I think
  - geokon 2y ago
    Network access is a default permission. I think only if you run something like GrepheneOS is it a manageable permission
Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2y ago
This keyboard is incredible and I decided to pay for it just 10 minutes after started using it because it really ticks all the boxes I've been waiting for years. Thanks a lot FUTO! CAN'T wait to see what you'll do next!
Arch-TK 2y ago
Wow, I didn't know you could do this with the Apache License. This is a fork with a license which revokes some of the permissive aspects. Honestly, I wish FUTO didn't do this. When Louis Rossmann made a video about Grayjay he claimed it was "Open Source". When I looked at the license, it was something very similar to this. Now it seems both Louis and the website for this keyboard have been extremely careful not to ever claim the project is "Open Source" (which is a good thing, from my POV, as it avoids muddying the waters). That being said, the concerns raised by Louis in that video which tried to address why Grayjay went for a custom source available proprietary license rather than an open source license were just weak arguments. There was an insistence that without the license someone would take the project, fork it, re-upload it to appstores under a different name with added advertisements and other bullshit. But I think in reality anyone who was planning to do that won't be discouraged by a restrictive license. I also know of open source projects which are perfectly capable of being commercialized on the play store/whatever while being actually open source including the ability to re-distribute copies with the license checks removed. A weird proprietary license all because of worries of things which can and will still happen but are very unlikely to cause the project to become unsuccessful regardless of if you have a legal stick to hit people with or not.
- josephcsible 2y ago
  > Wow, I didn't know you could do this with the Apache License. This is a fork with a license which revokes some of the permissive aspects. That's basically the distinguisher between permissive licenses (e.g., MIT and Apache) and copyleft ones (e.g., GPL). With permissively-licensed software, forks can be other licenses, even proprietary ones, but with copyleft-licensed software, forks need to stay copyleft-licensed. This is why the FSF calls permissive licenses "pushover licenses".
- bo0tzz 2y ago
  > anyone who was planning to do that won't be discouraged by a restrictive license. They might not be discouraged, but a restrictive license would provide recourse to stop them - with a less restrictive license they'd be fully allowed to do that.
drekipus 2y ago
Trying this keyboard out (right now) Some of the more annoying things about Google keyboard, is when swipe fails to activate. I think swiping is really pivotal to mobile input. I've been tempted to run some analysis and try find a keyboard layout that minimises errors, gives greater accuracy and speed of input, etc. But it is a big project. I want to keep the 3 row layout/size as well, just rearrange the keys for swiping. ( I have seen some keyboards try to promise effective swiping but they are too obtuse and different for me to feel comfortable with using rather than just rearranging qwerty) Review of FUTO: It's alright. The swiping has a little bit of inaccuracy but that is just due to noticing it versus Google's data harvesting. The voice input is also something that I use and it seems okay with Futo but it relies on me saying the whole sentence which it will then analyze and put in the grammar. That is pretty good and it does a really good job of it. I am used to voice talking and correcting as I go, so this will be something to get used to. All in all, I like it. And I will try it for a little while.
- tucnak 2y ago
  > I've been tempted to run some analysis and try find a keyboard layout that minimises errors You should check this out; https://jasmcole.com/2017/06/04/swype-right/ https://jasmcole.com/2017/06/04/swype-right/
  - drekipus 2y ago
    This is awesome! Thanks. One of the comments raises the main concern that I have as well, which is the ambiguity, in and on are fairly similar, but there's also other combinations that are way worse. Wide and worse being one of them. We almost want to encode the direction of the letters from each combination, and maximize the angular distance but minimise the magnitude of direction. Great link. Thanks
  - yorwba 2y ago
    That minimizes distance traveled. https://sangaline.com/post/finding-an-optimal-keyboard-layout-for-swype/ https://sangaline.com/post/finding-an-optimal-keyboard-layou... minimizes errors.
Valakas_ 2y ago
Am i the only one that often presses the dot key by mistake when going for the space? Would it be possible to add an option to make the space key a bit smaller on the right side so there's more space between the two keys and prevent this?
fersarr 2y ago
I cannot see the price even going a few clicks deep into the buy button.
- stavros 2y ago
  It's $4.99, but purchases don't work yet in the app.
Bobaso 2y ago
I use SwiftKey with a firewall rule blocking it. rooted android (with AFwall)
dotancohen 2y ago
My language has under 1000 hours of training data, so apparently is not well supported. How can I help add more training data? I actually have tens of hours of transcriptions of my own voice in my language, because I take many voice notes spanning back almost two decades. Most of it is very personal, but I could probably sort away a good portion for this and other projects. https://keyboard.futo.org/whisper-training-data-breakdown https://keyboard.futo.org/whisper-training-data-breakdown
- richardboegli 2y ago
  Hi dotancohen, More info of how to help here. https://github.com/futo-org/voice-input-models https://github.com/futo-org/voice-input-models
  - dotancohen 2y ago
    Thank you!
- yorwba 2y ago
  If you contribute to Mozilla Commmon Voice, it'll probably make its way into their training data eventually. https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en/languages https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en/languages If you want to use your existing recordings, uploading them to YouTube or archive.org with a Creative Commons license might also work.
  - dotancohen 2y ago
    Great, thanks, I'll spend some time with that.
coolgoose 2y ago
I really miss a good t9 keyboard.

346 points by richardboegli 2y ago

Remember that every single thing offered in the past as "not wiretappable" was put out by someone who was wiretapping everyone who used it.

factorialboy 2y ago

It seems impossible to uninstall Gboard on my Android device, but I figured out how to make FUTO the default. Weirdly opening the FUTO keyboard app makes Gboard the default, but hey, I know how to switch. And yes, FUTO is absolutely worth it. Love the customizability for touch typing and the voice tying works great for me.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

brokenmachine 2y ago

Does it support alternative keyboard layouts such as Dvorak?

SomniusX 2y ago

I've tried to setup FUTO with English as primary, added externally imported voice model, dictionary and engine and then added a secondary language (Greek) that I've only being able to add the external voice model. I've been able to voice dictate in Greek but no suggestions or other features The worst part I wanted to be noted is the keyboard layout switching method, in order for me as a user to press and hold the space and then while having one or two hands focused on the lower end of the device I need to reach out to the top to select the language by hand. I would suggest implemented a different approach via Spacebar slide left/right or even a dedicated keyboard layout switch button. After all that see if dictionary files can really be imported cause tar/gz or other archive files aren't working thru import. Last I'd like to thank the developers of FUTO keyboard, I'll keep trying to replace SwiftKey with FUTO and when it l'll gets ripe I'll also jump on the donation / payment to the cause. Keep it up !!

thih9 2y ago

> Your contribution ensures FUTO Keyboard remains ad-free and fully functional. I would prefer an upfront cost and one that makes the product sustainable - instead of a free product with the danger of enshitification.

zvmaz 2y ago
I did not read it as a "threat".
RadiozRadioz 2y ago
With other FUTO products they ask that you buy them, but also give away the source. Perhaps they could use that model here as well.
- logicprog 2y ago
  They do, they keyboard's source is available from their gitlab and you're allowed to copy, modify, and redistribute it, as long as you don't remove the section in the app that lets people pay them and don't sell your derivative works. Sort of a CC-BY-SA-NC deal. Seems fair enough to me — not ideally FOSS, but something I can live with. There are few things I use anymore that aren't totally FOSS but I do compromise sometimes if all of quality, ease of use, security, and privacy gain and the loss in perfect freedom is small enough.
wmf 2y ago
If nobody pays they won't introduce ads; they'll more likely just go out of business.
- vdfs 2y ago
  Why an offline keyboard would go out of business? They can just stop development or keep it at bare minimum at worst cases. It's more likely this would be sold to an other company if it get popular.
  - skeledrew 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

josephcsible 2y ago

The license: https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/latinime/-/blob/master/LICENSE.md https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/latinime/-/blob/master/LICENSE.... Concerning parts: > You may use [...] the software only for non-commercial purposes > You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge > you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software related to payment to the Licensor ---- Also, the button that says "Download from F-Droid" is super misleading. It's actually downloading it from a third-party repo that happens to be compatible with the F-Droid app, but it sure makes it sound like you're going to download it from F-Droid's repo.

bogwog 2y ago
What point are you trying to make by quoting the license?
- josephcsible 2y ago
  That it's not even close to FOSS, and that you're not allowed to make it stop harassing you for money.
  - logicprog 2y ago
    It doesn't harass you for money, what? The option to pay just lives in a section tucked away in the settings page, and the "yes I've already paid" button works on the honor system anyway.
    - josephcsible 2y ago
      > It doesn't harass you for money, what? The option to pay just lives in a section tucked away in the settings page, Are you sure? https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/latinime/-/blob/9f70a84dc85830d0bdf9e584e7b4f6f3a3603585/java/src/org/futo/inputmethod/latin/uix/settings/pages/Payment.kt#L206-256 https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/latinime/-/blob/9f70a84dc85830d... seems to indicate otherwise. > and the "yes I've already paid" button works on the honor system anyway. Then what's the license key for that you get when you pay?

Electrolux 2y ago

saying "download from fdroid" and pointing to your private repo is the shittiest thing anyone can do. it's the same as linking to your .exe or .img and saying "get it from microsoft/apple". no it's not. you are just using those platforms ability to handle links and extension of functionality. it is in no way the validation from those platforms that wording like they do imply

NikkiA 2y ago
I don't even understand what I'm supposed to do with that QR code, f-droid has no ability to add a repo from QR code that I can see, so I have to type in the fingerprint manually?
newsclues 2y ago
For sounds like the right word not from.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
alex-futo 2y ago
The wording was not intentionally construed to imply anything of the sort. It's been updated now to say "with" instead of "from"
MrOwen 2y ago
What about software you download from a third party yum or apt repo? You would still say you're getting it from yum/apt, albeit not from a red hat or canonical hosted yum/apt repo. Same for f-droid. They're just called f-droid repos and the biggest repo that currently exists is also run by f-droid.
Sateallia 2y ago
That's more on F-Droid, no? If someone said "Download from Cydia", I would not expect it to download it from Saurik's official repository called "Cydia/Telesphoreo". Using the same name for the app (store kit) and the repository is just a bad design choice, especially if the reference implementation comes with only the said repository.

bpev 2y ago

How is multilingual support? Because I feel like this is usually the thing that I find to be quite poor in smaller company keyboards, and I don't see anything on their landing page. Edit: specifically for non-roman chars ala chinese or japanese is where I tend to see gaps

bjoli 2y ago
Typing jn english is fine. Typing in Swedish is not. The auto correct is pretty bad. I haven't tried German yet. I will probably continue using it just to see where it goes.
tjpnz 2y ago
Doesn't seem to support it and it's not for lack of trying either. Such a shame as it will make it difficult to use Japanese sites and interact with my wife when she decides to switch language.
Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2y ago
For the voice input it works perfectly well in French. For simultaneous multilingual typing I don't think it's currently supported but I'm thinking we will soon seen a finetuned transformer for multilingual text prediction as well as a multilingual dictionary and that would solve it.
stavros 2y ago
Switching keyboards is a huge hassle. Instead of just a swipe on the spacebar, you have to long-press the spacebar, a window pops up, you select your language there, and possibly press "ok" (I'm not sure on the last one). Just a complete non-starter, as far as language support goes.

freedomben 2y ago

I think this is a cool idea, and is something I would pay for, but I'm concerned about the (lack of) openness. It's a lot harder than I would prefer to figure out these factoids for example: 1. FUTO Keyboard is licensed "FUTO Source First License 1.0" 2. FUTO Keyboard is a fork of the AOSP keyboard (called LatinIME). LatinIME is open source, Apache licensed. 3. The source code is here: https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/latinime/ https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/latinime/ I'm not an open source purist, but the more central/fundamental the project is to my life/workflow, the more important that becomes to me. A keyboard is pretty fundamental. I'd love to have an open source keyboard that is good, especially with good speech to text (it drives me crazy how Google continually changes the behavior of STT on the Pixel 8. I get the philosophy behind incremental improvement, but it's a continual stream of two steps forward, one step backward, one forward, two backward, three forward, etc. Just as I learn the quirks and how to work around them, it all changes and there's all new quirks to learn and workaround. Maddening). It's still early days, but this an interesting project to keep an eye on!

sleepycatgirl 2y ago
Oh yea, anything FUTO is not open source. Its merely source available.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  That's what open source is. I have the application and I have the source code.
  - sleepycatgirl 2y ago
    Nope. It restricts modifications one can do, and how to distribute it. There is quite a stark difference between source available, and open source.
    - praveenperera 2y ago
      You can modify however you want, you just can't turn around and sell it.

logicprog 2y ago

I saw this from the Louis Rossmann video and have been trying it out for the past couple hours — in fact I'm actually dictating this message with it right now — and honestly, it seems pretty great! Certainly much higher quality and more reliable than the version of Google Voice Dictation that I was using (sandboxed without network access) on GraphineOS previously, which would crash regularly and had only passable voice dictation quality. My only problem is that it doesn't seem to let you speak punctuation marks, so it's sort of hard to get my sentences punctuated the way I want them to be. The keyboard itself is also very high quality; it seems to have a really highly polished interface and a pretty good number of features and options, almost competing with openboard!

pcdoodle 2y ago
Awesome, thanks for sharing your experience with it. I like what FUTO is doing.
privacyking 2y ago
With the punctuation marks have you tried enabling symbols dictation?
- logicprog 2y ago
  I did, but it didn't seem to do anything?

vile_wretch 2y ago

No comments about the product really but an iPhone as a placeholder device on their website is an odd choice.

ivanjermakov 2y ago
Although it does look similar to an iPhone, that's how all flagship smartphones look in 2024...
jitl 2y ago
As an iPhone user I was confused to see my device, scroll down, then all the app stores listed were Android! (Although other than source-availability the other features come on the standard iPhone keyboard)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

rom1v 2y ago

What are private and open source keyboards on Android? I use [OpenBoard](https://f-droid.org/fr/packages/org.dslul.openboard.inputmethod.latin/ https://f-droid.org/fr/packages/org.dslul.openboard.inputmet...), but there is no update since 2022 (it works well though).

skeledrew 2y ago
Heliboard works really great, but for swiping you need to manually add Google's lib (which I did), and support for alternative language layouts is very basic (if that's something you need).
- rom1v 2y ago
  Oh, thank you. https://alternativeto.net/software/heliboard/about/ https://alternativeto.net/software/heliboard/about/ > HeliBoard is a fork of OpenBoard, continuing the project from where it stopped.
- privacyking 2y ago
  Futo keyboard has much better word prediction
  - skeledrew 2y ago
    It's nice, but I've gotten too used to seeing the long-press keys in my previous keyboards, and having a number row. Let's see how the layout for other languages (mainly Japanese) shake out though.
    - privacyking 2y ago
      That was the first thing I enabled. The option to show the symbols isn't the bottom of the theme settings
      - skeledrew 2y ago
        Interesting. Still no number row, but much better. And having voice input integrated means that I can remove the dedicated app. Still really just missing Japanese keyboard layout support.

dvh 2y ago

The only reason I'm unhappy with gboard are the constant updates. And as I'm typing now I see that the predicted words are often wrong compared to gboard and occasionally i get 1s lag. It's borderline unusable, not because of the lag but because of the inferior predictions.

madspindel 2y ago

No iOS version?

Sytten 2y ago

Personnaly been using the open source AnySoftKeyboard for the past 8 years without issue. It is very flexible so I am wondering what that brings really to the table. They could have sponsored AnySoftKeyboard instead.

lowkey 2y ago
Both are privacy-focused open-source keyboards, the difference is that FUTO Keyboards also includes a polished voice-input capability designed for dictation and speech-to-text functionality that is also fully-offline capable and built on top of Whisper models. I don't believe AnySoftKeyboard offers this capability but I could be mistaken.
- josephcsible 2y ago
  Of the two, only AnySoftKeyboard is open-source.
  - lowkey 2y ago
    Correction: only AnySoftKeyboard is open source according to the 0SI definition – an organization that famously did not invent the term open source but co-opted it from Christine Peterson, and which is primarily funded by closed source tech giants, such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft who are wildly conflicted in their interest as they profit heavily from open source software, according to the current definition while contributing virtually nothing back. Coincidence? I think not.
    - growse 2y ago
      > according to the current definition while contributing virtually nothing back. This argument looks a bit silly when even the most cursory research would reveal that many major and widely-used open source projects are most significantly contributed to by people working for these "closed source tech giants".
- kragen 2y ago

okso 2y ago

Finally a voice recognition keyboard that works well on Android and offline! I just tested it and the quality in English at least is great. Too bad that the license is not open-source, I prefer donating to projects that are open-source even if asking for a fee to use (ex: Netguard, MyExpenses).

MrOwen 2y ago
?? https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/latinime https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/latinime Isn't that the whole point of futo? Paid for open source software?
- josephcsible 2y ago
  It's not open-source, just source-available. Check the license.
  - lowkey 2y ago
    Correction, it isn’t open-source according to the definition of opensource.org - an organization that famously did not invent the term but just co-opted it and whose primary source of funding comes from private closed-source tech giants such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft - a clear and very serious conflict of interest.
    - Brian_K_White 2y ago
      You keep going on about them not inventing the term, as though that matters. They din't invent it, they proposed a formal definition, and other people agreed, and have been using the term to mean that meaning for decades by now. You can't change the meaning to suit yourself at this point after other people have already used it. That would be changing other people's words. You can't very well accuse OSI or anyone else of the crime of presumtion while being willing to do that. "did not invent the term" is just a totally pointless and silly thing to even think about or say. It's as silly as saying that Websters didn't invent the words they write down definitions for.

lowkey 2y ago

I haven't personally used the FUTO keyboard since it is Android-only and I am on an iPhone, but I do want to share some context on FUTO.org as it is a fantastic group with an inspiring mission.to provide decentralized alternatives to the tech oligopoly. The have funded development of Signal, Louis Rossman's Right to Repair Advocacy, Trieve.ai - the YC 2024 open-source AI-powered search platform, TOR project, GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, KiCAD, VLC, Zulip, Blender, FFmpeg, GIMP, KeePassX, PeerTube, Free Software Foundation, NeoVIM, Lichess, GitLab, and many many more. The company doesn't promote itself heavily so you have to deep-dive to truly understand their impact, but it is significant. It was founded and funded by a developer and entrepreneur who sold his company to Yahoo back in the day, ran Yahoo Games for a while and then took his considerable resources and moved to Austin, TX where he built an amazing ecosystem around decentralized technology. I am not directly affiliated with FUTO but I know them because they host free lunches for decentralized tech enthusiasts every Friday on their campus in Austin, which I regularly attend as do some notable figures from the open-source, decentralized tech and privacy-forward community such as the CTO of Signal, CalyxOS and others. If you are ever in Austin on a Friday I encourage you to come check out a FUTO lunch to be inspired, meet friendly folks and talk about our decentralized future. Lunch details are posted on their Zulip chat, available from FUTO.org

nickorlow 2y ago
They donated to Asahi Linux too :)

GaggiX 2y ago

Some interesting technology behind the voice recognition: https://github.com/futo-org/whisper-acft https://github.com/futo-org/whisper-acft

skeledrew 2y ago

I've been using their Voice Input for a few months now and really like it. My only issue is that it buffers the input and then spews it all when you stop speaking, but I guess that helps the model to be more contextually accurate. I hope their Keyboard is as good and provides decent multilingual support. Currently using Heliboard, and have to switch to a broken GO Keyboard install (dictionary is missing), that failed to properly clone from my previous device, whenever I want to type Japanese.

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2y ago
The fact that you have to wait the end of the 30 seconds before it starts writing the text is a fundamental limitation of the current transformer algorithm because the first and the last bits of speech influence each other so you have to wait until the end.
- skeledrew 2y ago
  Yeah I get that. I tried another open source voice input that was real time and the quality was horrible. But this is something that can be worked around for Whisper. One thing that comes to mind is an option to append and reprocess the audio every few centiseconds (needs a fairly powerful device though), and update the text output as needed. This could also open the door for an edit-by-voice feature.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

7e 2y ago

Which modern keyboards do connect to the Internet? The Apple and Google keyboards, AFACT, use private federated learning to keep their vocabularies up to date with the latest trending topics. I don’t think this solves a problem I have, unless the offline dictation is somehow much better than the best big tech has to offer.

threwawasy1228 2y ago
There are numerous issues with the 'privacy-preserving' federated learning models that are used by Google and Apple. They have constantly been called out by privacy researchers and cryptographers due to their misuse of differential privacy. There is very little trust in the privacy-preserving measures that are being used by these companies. This is not to say that these methods are bad in general but in terms of how they are used by Google and Apple, they amount to little more than a PR stunt. There are numerous reconstruction attacks on their privacy protocols as used by things like GBoard.
nulld3v 2y ago
GBoard does kinda "keylog" in the telemetry it sends (actually, it's more "wordlog"): https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/gboard_kamil.pdf https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/gboard_kamil.pdf It will also do this even if you block the keyboard's internet access as it will use Google Play Services to send the telemetry data. Previously discussed in this deleted reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ymo3r9/deleted_by_user/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ymo3r9/deleted_by_... At least turning off the "Share usage statistics" option in Gboard settings actually does opt you out...
- privacyking 2y ago
  Do you have a source for that? Where it sends through play services if network access is disabled? What does it send specifically?
  - yencabulator 2y ago
    Read the linked PDF.

traeumerei 2y ago

[dead]

BlackLotus89 2y ago

So I tested every open source keyboard a while back and was thouroughly disappointed with every solution. (tested for swipe, word prediction/text prediction, language support, "coding" support, size, speed [yes there are slow Keyboards]) Switched back to asop. This keyboard is over a 100MB as well, BUT it's the first keyboard where I get the additional size. I habe to check if this is "open source enough" for my needs but glancing over the comments it seems to be completly source available at least which is great. If this turns out to be a decent keyboard I only need an open source text to speech solution and I'm golden. Edit: tried the keyboard and I failed in adding the dictionaries I downloaded. And I failed to find language models for other languages, but the keyboard seems nice at first glance. Have to try it on a low end device to see how it really performs, but I could live with this Edit2: oof seems a bit heavy. Phone feels warmer and battery usage reported by Android is kinda high. Have to throughly test the different settings and see how it affects battery life Edit3: so the voice recognition is okish. If you don't say anything and press the circle it hallucinates something and it's a bit annoying that it only prints out the text after you are done talking, but it is usable. Now I need the ability to transcribe voice messages I get using whisper as well :) Edit4: OK text prediction is really bad right now. I saw a function to learn from my typing behaviour (with the "eats batteries" warning attached), but hopefully it will get better through this

bgoated01 2y ago
I tested several open source keyboards last year looking for a way to get rid of the distracting gif search in gboard, and was also very disappointed and went back to gboard. After trying this one for just a couple minutes, this looks much more usable than those I tried last time. I don't use voice texting, and mostly just need decent swiping and prediction. I'm hoping this will meet those needs!
- BlackLotus89 2y ago
  Of you are looking for swipe support only AOSP and and AnySoft gave good results for me. There certainly are some other swipe keyboards, but most feel broken. FUTOs swipe also feels great

627467 2y ago

Any keyboard incapable of simultaneously (without switching) support multiple languages is a deal breaker for me... Unfortunately it seems like gboard is the only one that supports this

sho_hn 2y ago
How does that work? (I use Gboard with English and Korean and have to switch.)
- somethingsaid 2y ago
  I’m on iPhone, using English and Dutch with the built in keyboard and it’s pretty seamless. Basically the layout doesn’t change (it’s always qwerty) but it will detect the language I’m typing and spell check for that language. That might only be possible/easy for languages with a (mostly) common alphabet. Edit: there’s also a button to force the language if I want to override it. It also seems to read the text on screen or remember what apps use what language as it will auto-select the right language most of the time.
- lambda 2y ago
  It works when using multiple languages that share the same writing system (the Latin alphabet). It means that you have a single keyboard, but the words that swipe or auto complete are from more than one language; generally the predictive nature means that when you switch languages it's pretty good at predicting future words are from the same language. It also means things like you get all the diacritics from all of the languages when you long press. I was studying French, while also working with several Polish people, so I set my keyboard to simultaneously English, French, and Polish, and then I was able to do French lessons without switching, and also able to write my Polish coworkers names easily.
namtab00 2y ago
SwiftKey does too..
therein 2y ago
One of the main reasons I won't switch to iOS.

nightpool 2y ago

Kind of a side note, but why does every Zulip chat require a different email/password? Especially to even see the chatroom? It's really frustrating for every Zulip chat I've tried to join. We wouldn't even need server-to-server federation to fix this, even simply using a Google login would go a long way to help make these chats more accessible.

tabbott 2y ago
Just a quick correction: Zulip supports logging in with your Google account (as well as GitHub, GitLab and Apple): https://zulip.com/help/configure-authentication-methods https://zulip.com/help/configure-authentication-methods. In Zulip Cloud, those options are enabled by default, but chat.futo.org is a self-hosted system, and I assume they either haven't done the setup work (getting API keys, etc.) for those authentication methods, or don't want to for policy reasons. As to why every organization has its own accounts, each organization has different people administering/controlling them, and separate accounts for different Zulip organizations is a lot cleaner of a security model, both for business customers but also for projects that are paranoid or opinionated about authentication options. That said, we are planning to create a Zulip Cloud SSO option that would allow users in the many communities that aren't picky about authentication to use a single login for all their Zulip Cloud organizations. Feedback on how exactly you'd like to see that work is appreciated, especially in #feedback on https://chat.zulip.org https://chat.zulip.org, where it'd have the most visibility within our project. Open organizations can also set any channel to be publicly accessible without logging in, which I'd expect to be useful for something like FUTO: https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option.
- nightpool 2y ago
  Thanks, but I understand that Zulip is technically capable of all of these things—that doesn't change the fact that it's still a very, very common frustration any time an org links to their Zulip channels. So it's clear that the additional setup required to go through Google auth review, get API tokens, test the integration, etc is just not feasible or reasonable to expect for many self-hosted admins. > That said, we are planning to create a Zulip Cloud SSO option that would allow users in the many communities that aren't picky about authentication to use a single login for all their Zulip Cloud organizations Would this be easy and accessible for self-hosted installs? e.g., can self-hosted installs now use Zulip Cloud auth out of the box with no further setup? Maybe even have it enabled by default for open organizations? That seems to be the biggest problem with the existing social login schemes. Defaults matter a lot, and if Zulip continues to ship with "Slack-like" defaults instead of "Discord-like" defaults, it's going to continue to be just as frustrating to see Zulip links on org websites. > Open organizations can also set any channel to be publicly accessible without logging in, which I'd expect to be useful for something like FUTO: https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option. Again, I understand that this capability exists, but it's very complicated for administrators to enable, and requires an explicit opt in for EVERY individual channel that is made public in this way, which means in practice it's very rare. Having a good web-public organization requires a long list of steps: 1. manually editing the server config files to enable the feature. 2. having an administrator enable the option for the org. 3. having individual users remember to set channels as web-public every time they create them. 4. having an administrator audit popular channels and make sure they're set to web-public if necessary I think many organizations would be better served with a "public channels are web-public by default" option that does NOT require editing config files or manually changing settings for every individual channel. The distinction between "this channel is public and anybody can sign up for an account to read it" and "this channel is public and anybody can read it" is very, very slight and while I can see the value of making that distinction on an org level, I do not expect 95% of open-source orgs to have the policies / guidance necessary to enable users to confidently make a fine-grained distinction on a channel by channel level. This means that the distinction between public and web-public adds a lot of cognitive overhead and basically leads users to choose between those privacy types at random, unless their org has a "all channels must be web-public" or similar policy (like rust-lang does). In fact, checking the docs now, it looks like normal users can't even create web-public channels, so other orgs can't even replicate rust's policy without restricting who is allowed to create channels. Unfortunately, both of these features fall prey to very common open source UX traps—having a bad out of the box experience (no SSO) ruin a user's first impression of your project, and having too many customization options, leading to user confusion on which settings to use when.

crossroadsguy 2y ago

Not to diss on this keyboard but does this even matter on the standard Android OS (not a custom ROM) (and do we even know this about iOS)? Every single thing you do or don't do is tracked and sent anyway.

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2y ago
I think it matters greatly because currently even if you have a custom ROM on Android you still don't have a choice for offline speech recognition. For me I'm on grapheneOS and was still stuck without speech recognition until FUTO uploaded this. This keyboard is awesome and I paid for it 10 minutes after paying for it.

disqard 2y ago

This looks pretty polished. Does anyone else here use MessageEase?

velox_neb 2y ago
I do, for over a decade. Hope it doesn't die. Can't fathom how people live with these tiny qwerty keyboards on a touchscreen.
- wilted-iris 2y ago
  There's an open source reimplantation in case the original stops working: https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key
xigoi 2y ago
I did. When it got enshittified, I switched to Unexpected Keyboard with a custom layout (it supports MessagEese-style 8-directional swipe keys).

pitaj 2y ago

Very cool! Some things missing from Gboard: - clipboard suggestions - emoji search - gif search - stickers - Bitmoji integration

tentacleuno 2y ago
Emoji search is one of the reasons why I still use GBoard, to be honest. None of the open-source offerings seem to have it.

kragen 2y ago

noncommercial use only: https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/latinime/-/blob/master/LICENSE.md https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/latinime/-/blob/master/LICENSE....

nh2 2y ago

SwiftKey is clever in that it corrects depending on where you press in the key: If I type "Akk" it corrects it to "All" only if I pressed the "k" on its right side (near the "L" key); if I pressed it further left, it keeps "Akk". That works really well. Can FUTO do that too?

2StepsOutOfLine 2y ago
Tangentially, I think I may have developed some bad habits and muscle memory from relying on features like this when typing on android. So much so that when typing using FUTO's keyboard I ended up just getting frustrated at all the misspelling and went back to native.
- nh2 2y ago
  Not convinced it's "bad habits"; it just seems FUTO can improve a bit here. For example, today I typed "I'm not sure bit"; SwiftKey reliably corrects that to "I'm not sure but" (I believe even without any local learning) and FUTO doesn't. "I'm not sure bit" is just a very unlikely sentence, and I believe any Markov chain model should easily correct that.
  - nh2 2y ago
    I filed a couple such common cases here: https://github.com/futo-org/android-keyboard/issues/102#issuecomment-2198757251 https://github.com/futo-org/android-keyboard/issues/102#issu...
torginus 2y ago
I really miss physical keyboards. This issue only occurs because we're poor at controlly which part of our big sausage fingers actually make contact with the screen. The world used to be full of sliding phones with dedicated keyboards, but for some reason every manufacturer is content making the same glass rectangle. It's like we created a problem and are trying to solve that problem with technology, instead of not creating the problem in the first place.

infogulch 2y ago

Normal typing and dictation is pretty good, but the swipe mode (my preference) is unusably bad.

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2y ago
I don't share your experience, to me it's fine and perfectly usable
rycomb 2y ago
I agree. I really hope that they improve it.

vedmed 2y ago

really nice but lacking a numberpad do people really type numbers using a number row?

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2y ago
Yes!

geokon 2y ago

How do you check an app is offline without combing through the source code..?

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2y ago
You can see if it asks for network access right? You can even revoke it I think
- geokon 2y ago
  Network access is a default permission. I think only if you run something like GrepheneOS is it a manageable permission

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2y ago

This keyboard is incredible and I decided to pay for it just 10 minutes after started using it because it really ticks all the boxes I've been waiting for years. Thanks a lot FUTO! CAN'T wait to see what you'll do next!

Arch-TK 2y ago

Wow, I didn't know you could do this with the Apache License. This is a fork with a license which revokes some of the permissive aspects. Honestly, I wish FUTO didn't do this. When Louis Rossmann made a video about Grayjay he claimed it was "Open Source". When I looked at the license, it was something very similar to this. Now it seems both Louis and the website for this keyboard have been extremely careful not to ever claim the project is "Open Source" (which is a good thing, from my POV, as it avoids muddying the waters). That being said, the concerns raised by Louis in that video which tried to address why Grayjay went for a custom source available proprietary license rather than an open source license were just weak arguments. There was an insistence that without the license someone would take the project, fork it, re-upload it to appstores under a different name with added advertisements and other bullshit. But I think in reality anyone who was planning to do that won't be discouraged by a restrictive license. I also know of open source projects which are perfectly capable of being commercialized on the play store/whatever while being actually open source including the ability to re-distribute copies with the license checks removed. A weird proprietary license all because of worries of things which can and will still happen but are very unlikely to cause the project to become unsuccessful regardless of if you have a legal stick to hit people with or not.

josephcsible 2y ago
> Wow, I didn't know you could do this with the Apache License. This is a fork with a license which revokes some of the permissive aspects. That's basically the distinguisher between permissive licenses (e.g., MIT and Apache) and copyleft ones (e.g., GPL). With permissively-licensed software, forks can be other licenses, even proprietary ones, but with copyleft-licensed software, forks need to stay copyleft-licensed. This is why the FSF calls permissive licenses "pushover licenses".
bo0tzz 2y ago
> anyone who was planning to do that won't be discouraged by a restrictive license. They might not be discouraged, but a restrictive license would provide recourse to stop them - with a less restrictive license they'd be fully allowed to do that.

drekipus 2y ago

Trying this keyboard out (right now) Some of the more annoying things about Google keyboard, is when swipe fails to activate. I think swiping is really pivotal to mobile input. I've been tempted to run some analysis and try find a keyboard layout that minimises errors, gives greater accuracy and speed of input, etc. But it is a big project. I want to keep the 3 row layout/size as well, just rearrange the keys for swiping. ( I have seen some keyboards try to promise effective swiping but they are too obtuse and different for me to feel comfortable with using rather than just rearranging qwerty) Review of FUTO: It's alright. The swiping has a little bit of inaccuracy but that is just due to noticing it versus Google's data harvesting. The voice input is also something that I use and it seems okay with Futo but it relies on me saying the whole sentence which it will then analyze and put in the grammar. That is pretty good and it does a really good job of it. I am used to voice talking and correcting as I go, so this will be something to get used to. All in all, I like it. And I will try it for a little while.

tucnak 2y ago
> I've been tempted to run some analysis and try find a keyboard layout that minimises errors You should check this out; https://jasmcole.com/2017/06/04/swype-right/ https://jasmcole.com/2017/06/04/swype-right/
- drekipus 2y ago
  This is awesome! Thanks. One of the comments raises the main concern that I have as well, which is the ambiguity, in and on are fairly similar, but there's also other combinations that are way worse. Wide and worse being one of them. We almost want to encode the direction of the letters from each combination, and maximize the angular distance but minimise the magnitude of direction. Great link. Thanks
- yorwba 2y ago
  That minimizes distance traveled. https://sangaline.com/post/finding-an-optimal-keyboard-layout-for-swype/ https://sangaline.com/post/finding-an-optimal-keyboard-layou... minimizes errors.

Valakas_ 2y ago

Am i the only one that often presses the dot key by mistake when going for the space? Would it be possible to add an option to make the space key a bit smaller on the right side so there's more space between the two keys and prevent this?

fersarr 2y ago

I cannot see the price even going a few clicks deep into the buy button.

stavros 2y ago
It's $4.99, but purchases don't work yet in the app.

Bobaso 2y ago

I use SwiftKey with a firewall rule blocking it. rooted android (with AFwall)

dotancohen 2y ago

My language has under 1000 hours of training data, so apparently is not well supported. How can I help add more training data? I actually have tens of hours of transcriptions of my own voice in my language, because I take many voice notes spanning back almost two decades. Most of it is very personal, but I could probably sort away a good portion for this and other projects. https://keyboard.futo.org/whisper-training-data-breakdown https://keyboard.futo.org/whisper-training-data-breakdown

richardboegli 2y ago
Hi dotancohen, More info of how to help here. https://github.com/futo-org/voice-input-models https://github.com/futo-org/voice-input-models
- dotancohen 2y ago
  Thank you!
yorwba 2y ago
If you contribute to Mozilla Commmon Voice, it'll probably make its way into their training data eventually. https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en/languages https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en/languages If you want to use your existing recordings, uploading them to YouTube or archive.org with a Creative Commons license might also work.
- dotancohen 2y ago
  Great, thanks, I'll spend some time with that.

coolgoose 2y ago

I really miss a good t9 keyboard.