FUTO Keyboard

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

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!

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.

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?

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/

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!

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

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).

What are private and open source keyboards on Android?

I use [OpenBoard](https://f-droid.org/fr/packages/org.dslul.openboard.inputmet...), but there is no update since 2022 (it works well though).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 !!

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

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

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.

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

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!

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.

Very cool! Some things missing from Gboard:

- clipboard suggestions

- emoji search

- gif search

- stickers

- Bitmoji integration

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?

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

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

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

Does it support alternative keyboard layouts such as Dvorak?

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

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

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

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.

I really miss a good t9 keyboard.

really nice but lacking a numberpad

do people really type numbers using a number row?

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.

The license: 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.

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

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

No iOS version?

> 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.