I’ve been playing with both the Thumb and the Unexpected keyboards. I like 'em both but, man, I have to admit I’d like them more if they had that top bar that predicts what you might be. Is that just a no-go from a privacy perspective? Can that functionality be local?
(I also wouldn’t mind a good voice typing feature)
If you are talking about Android keyboard, is https://github.com/helium314/openboard not a good option?
Updated 18 months ago on F-Droid, but the Github looks still active. I hope they’ll soon have a releasable version.
The project linked is a fork of the version on F-Driod. You can download the APK directly from the Github and use it just fine.
My only problem with it is, that it removes the currently typed word from the autocomplete bar.
For voice typing sayboard may be an option, i’ve never tried it so i’m not sure if it’s good or not though; while for the predictive text i have been looking for a keyboard that can do it as well
Have you tried FUTO?
No i haven’t, i’ll check it out later because the integration with keyboards seems interesting
Yes. Very possible. An LLM could possibly be run locally or just sandboxed for only you. In my experience, I guess because there is less training data and fewer iterations, it tends to take longer and result in poorer outputs.
Microsoft could also let you control this but of course they do not want to.
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I switched to Openboard. After a few months, Its not as good yet as SwiftKey was, but it’s also not sending all my text input to Microsoft.
The primary feature I miss from Swiftkey is the ability to insert a gif easily.
Do any of the open source keyboards have gif integration? I’ve tried floris and anysoft and I miss it so much.
I have yet to find one. I keep Swiftkey installed and switch inputs when I need to insert a gif.
While Google isn’t generally good for privacy GBoard actually does this. IIRC they actually completely removed the sync service and your typing history is only kept on-device and Android backup.
However it is a bit of a privacy nightmare otherwise as many of the other features phone home. But last I checked (~4 years ago, worth checking again) the core typing functionality is actually fully offline and private.
So yes, it is possible.
It can and it will. That is one of the uses of “NPUs” I’m most excited about.
Basically you can run an (potentially open-source) small LLM on the phone using whatever context the keyboard has access to (at a minumim, what you’ve typed so far) and have the keyboard generate the next token(s).
Since this is comptationally intensive the model has to be small and you need dedicated hardware to optimize it, otherwise you would need a 500W GPU like the big players. You can do it for 0.5W locally. Of course, adjust your expectations accordingly.
I don’t know any project doing it right now, but I imagine that Microsoft will integrate in SwiftKey soon, with open source projects to follow.
Four voice typing you could try FUTO which is what i use. Fdroid repo https://app.futo.org/fdroid/repo?fingerprint=39D47869D29CBFCE4691D9F7E6946A7B6D7E6FF4883497E6E675744ECDFA6D6D
