There are a whole lot of different keyboard solutions on Android, and let’s be honest: a lot of the offerings aren’t great. While many of them have strengths, I initially struggled in my de-googling of my life to find a keyboard that had everything I wanted with regards to layout, swipe typing, and voice input. What follows is the best method I’ve been able to come up with (credit to the cowboy-hatted individual who clued in me into FUTO voice).
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You can also use Whisper+ from F-Droid in place of Futo
FUTO has ties to Curtis Yarvin just so y’all are aware.
I dig Transcribro from the Accrescent app storestore, personally.
Whisper seems just a tiny bit better except I don’t like having to hold the button down.
My big gripe with heliboard is that I can’t change key size. (Unless you can and I missed it please tell me) Going from Gboard to heliboard I struggle to get the right words with swipe due to the size difference and it’s frustrating.
I have to use gboard on my work phone so there’s no just getting used to it unfortunately.
Edit to add changing keyboard height has helped quite a bit. I’m still a little off but this is much more usable.
U can totally customise it but I need to go in deep and mess with the layout json. I did it so I have a tab key on my main keyboard mainly for quick auto complete in terminals.
Able to share/point me in the right direction?
Go to Settings > Appearance > Keyboard Height Scale. Is this what you’re looking for?
Love the writeups they cook up. Always useful stuff. The Beetsflask guide is pretty helpful too.
That’s been exactly my setup for a while. Tried with all the others (Futo Keyboard / Whisper+ etc etc) and THIS setup you listed is the most versatile, reliable, multi-lingual setup I’ve managed to run on AOSP. Thanks for mentioning it!
Question to those that use it: Does heliboard have a floating mode like GBoard/SwiftKey/FUTO have? I have a tablet and a full-screen keyboard just feels very weird once I got used to floating.
Not yet, here is the open issue
Using Google play services free GrapheneOS on a Pixel 6 (so swipe even works with reduced screen estate) with the FUTO keyboard and this paragraph was completely written with its swipe feature. The only problematic words were GraphenOS and swipe.
Writing this by tapping again as I’m actually faster that way. But from what I can say, swiping works really good. I appreciate the authors effort but I won’t pull in some Google library again (especially related to monitoring keyboard input) via a hackish way.
I’m completely satisfied with FUTO as an all-in-one solution already. The voice input using local models works especially good. I’m not 100% sure but I could swear the devs changed the key sizes in one of the current updates. They’re perfectly sized now. The one thing I miss is a TAB key for autocompletition, when I’m logged in on a SSH terminal. But otherwise it’s feature complete for me.
