Right To Repair Advocate Louis Rossman recently announced the release of FUTO, a Text To Speech App that respects your privacy.
After having played around with FUTO on my GrapheneOS Pixel, I can honestly say it’s nice to have. Using the Openboards Keyboard, I’ll admit that the one thing I missed about Gboards was its text to speech capability, but I refused to use it because it logs everything said into it.
IMHO, the team that developed FUTO have created something truly special here, and I’d recommend anyone to at least try it out.
There is a one time $10 payment, but the developers have basically made this more like an opt in donation, as you can just click ‘I Already Paid’ and utilize the app regardless of whether you paid or not. If you try FUTO out, and like it, maybe throw them a few bucks.
Here is an invidious link of Rossman talking about FUTO and its features.
now they just need to make a keyboard, and make it integrate a jp ime… there are so few good keyboards that meet all the boxes on android…
as far as i know the only two keyboards that have decent english prediction and a jp ime are the gboard and anthy, both options suck fof different reasons
have you tried openboard?
openboard lacks a japanese IME, so it’s useless to me
I love Openboard as it has the closest layouts to Gboards (looks almost exactly the same imo). But I’ll admit that it’s prediction, while usually fine, can be very janky when trying to just edit a block of text. It will often delete the last space, undo the recent character edit, or jump to a different part of the text block when typing out the new edit.
All that said, the GrapheneOS default keyboard is just too basic imho, and while FlorisBoard is nice, it had worse prediction from what I observed.
The best is Gboards, and as another poster pointed out, you can just turn off Network access foe it to prevent telemetry. I just would prefer to use a competitor.
My main issue with Android keyboards is that i need multiple languages on the fly, i might be chatting in one language in one group and on another language on another, or even some limited mix and match in a single phrase. Currently using AnySoftKeyboard, since i can switch languages with a button, but oh damn is the prediction abysmal, looks like it only brings up all the potential words on any order and doesn’t even consider which one’s the most likely, no idea how’s it in reality but it feels like this.
If OpenBoard can cover my use case I’ll switch immediately.
there is this issue on github for a while. Could use a boost
Well damn, i like this idea!