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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[–] 6 points 8 months ago

I've been using Heliboard with the swipe typing library for about a year and it's been really good. only issue I have is for some reason the keyboard stops correcting until a restart, I'll type a word with 2 letters wrong, the suggestion will be on the bar and it won't replace it.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Transcribro uses the same engine as FUTO Voice but is actually open source.

    Unfortunately I can't use any keyboard other than GBoard simply because no one else has figured out swipe typing yet.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Have you tried Heliboard with Google swipe library?

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    Hey that's what I'm using.

    Do any of y'all know how to add emoji search with the .dict file?

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    The swipe typing on Heliboard can be a bit rough, and I have this issue where sometimes when the keyboard comes up, it isn't fully featured ie, swiping doesn't work and I can't bring up the copy/paste menu.

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  • 17 comments in c/android@lemdro.id view that post
    [–] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (9 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I had the same issue, I set it to 110% on my phone. It would be cool if someone put together a guide on common configurations to help it match other apps.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    You can also use Whisper+ from F-Droid in place of Futo

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    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!

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I use cleverkeys keyboard and futo voice for superior typing experience. The suggestions are simply unbeatable by anyone.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    I found cleverkeys to be terrible at swipe/gesture typing. It would fail at even simple, common, seemingly unambiguous words. Heliboard + gboard swipe lib was orders of magnitude better.

    I still use cleverkeys for termux though as the key gestures are brilliant.

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  • [–] 0 points 8 months ago

    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.

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