I love swiping for speed, because it's usually faster than tapping and easy to do one-handed, but then there are always a bunch of words that are too similar that it can never get right, it doesn't deal well with doubled vs single letters, etc.
So for the longest time, I've wanted a new keyboard layout specifically designed for swiping. In the same way that Dvorak was optimized for ergonomically typing English words, I want a keyboard layout designed to minimize word overlap/ambiguity when swiping.
It doesn't even necessarily have to have 26 keys, e.g. maybe there could be one key overloaded for v/w/x/z (and you long-press it if you ever want to type a single letter). On the other hand, maybe there need to be separate keys for 'e' and 'ee', or a special key for "double the previous letter".
Because I love swiping, but all my problems with it come from the fact that the QWERTY layout is far from ideal for it. I am 100% willing to learn a new layout if anyone will develop an optimal one for English so that swiping has a 99.9% accuracy rate instead of what currently feels more like 90% or 95%.
FUTO Swipe supports ClearFlow, which is exactly what you are talking about, a keyboard layout optimized for swiping: https://clearflowkeyboard.github.io/
I switched to ClearFlow a month or two ago after learning of it on Hackernews. It is available in GBoard.
I'm happy with the switch. Like any keyboard switch (I've gone from Qwerty to Dvorak and now a Colemak-dh derivative with about ten years on each) it takes some time to learn the layout. Overall I'm happy with it though and there are less frustrating misinterpretations and corrections needed.
This post was swiped on it with only two corrections and the second one was my fault as i misremembered a key location.
There's a section [1] on the page that has instructions, and video [2] too. I had to select the English (US) language to get the option to select ClearFlow.
Thanks. It's available only for the US layout, not UK.
I'm writing down a few impressions:
- the layout is unusual, but I get the motivation. Distances are minimised and letters are arranged so that ambiguity is removed.
- although I'm very slow, I haven't made a single mistake so far. Clearflow allows me to swipe much more accurately than stock gboard.
- the square keyboard layout unfortunately means that half the letters are constantly hidden behind my thumb. As I'm unfamiliar with the layout, this means that before swiping a word, I have to look at the layout, memorise letter locations and plan the movement
- since I write in multiple languages and Clearflow is available in only one of them, I would have to memorise a completely new layout for a language I write in only half the time.
Hi,
Yes I'm in the same boat as you - had to switch to US language instead of UK. I've been addiing the anglisised versions of words to my dictionary as I go along so it's becoming less of an issue over time. Maybe I'll switch to FUTO in order to not have to deal with this anymore. Gboard has one nice feature though in that I have multiple languages enabled so I get correct predictive completion in non-English languages.
For learning ClearFlow, I used the Games app available from the "Clearflow Games" section on their website: https://clearflowkeyboard.github.io/
I also have the issue of the thumb getting in the way so I spent a couple of days playing the games to get my layout memory up and then it became usable without frustration and I'm not looking back now although I occasionally still forget the odd letter location.
I have been a ClearFlow user for over a year now. Generally I like it, but there absolutely are still common words that are hard to input consistently. The THEA cluster has given me no shortage of problems. Still a fan though.
I actually can't find the answer on either of the linked pages, so it would be good to know. And I think people's experience is more important than the claims in these discussions.
And anyway, there's no keyboard on earth who can handle multi-language typing in a sane way. They either mash all languages together, or force random layouts on you, or... I stuck with GBoard because I just hate it less than others, so when I found this topic I thought yay let's try - until I read it's only for English. So there.
I really like how gboard handles it. It figures out what language I'm typing from the first couple of words and prioritises those. This way I can even mix languages within the same sentence and it will still recommend the right ones. It's really really good.
Are you sure, like really sure you mean gboard? In my gboard I choose the language I want to type in, and that's the language for everything (settings, typing, recommendations...).
I'd like to know where did they get the stats ClearFlow mentions in their site (reducing backspace corrections by 37.5% and shortening finger gliding distance by 41.6%.) and see what method did they use to analyze those swipe patterns and create .
It could be interesting for applying it to different languages (or modified word corpus).
The thumb typing muscle memory does not translate to finger typing at all. Most Dvorak or Colemak users are comfortable using QWERTY on their phones. Clearflow really only works well with swipe.
No, not muscle memory, but at least the idea of knowing where keys are. I'd bet that non-qwerty typers mostly started with qwerty and possibly still need to use it on some occasions, so they remember.
I can't speak for everyone but I did an experiment to see if this was the case (I actually just wanted to switch to Colemak everywhere. But iOS doesn't support it natively and third party keyboard landscape is pretty bleak on iOS). I switched to Dvorak on my phone and got really comfortable with it. I was already comfortable with Colemak on my computer. Then I tried
1. Switching to Dvorak on my computer AND
2. Switching to Colemak on my phone
I already had a feeling that my Dvorak experience on phone wasn't gonna help typing in a physical keyboard and indeed that was the case. But also, the physical keyboard experience with Colemak didn't really help with thumb typing/swiping on the phone. On a physical keyboard, I can only type QWERTY at around 30WPM and Colemak at around 130WPM. However, on the phone QWERTY is my strongest layout (even when I can only type at around 50WPM with it).
Then there's the design philosophy. Colemak aggressively keeps the most used letters on the homerow. Paste a random Wikipedia article into this page and you'll see (https://www.patrick-wied.at/projects/heatmap-keyboard/ alternatively, here's the heatmap for the introduction to today's featured article about Augustus: https://postimg.cc/9RT8P4N6). On a phone this means that a lot of the times you'll be swiping back and forth horizontally. Resulting in identical swipe paths for a lot of common words.
And if Clearflow was ported to a physical keyboard, most of your fingers won't be doing any work and the active fingers will be doing weird tap dance. The position of spacebar (undoubtedly the most used key on the keyboard) to the sides where you'd be using your pinky would make it an RSI machine.
My point is that if you're comfortable with QWERTY on the phone, that's not because you're comfortable with QWERTY on the desktop. That's because you got used to QWERTY on the phone.
> Because I love swiping, but all my problems with it come from the fact that the QWERTY layout is far from ideal for it. I am 100% willing to learn a new layout if anyone will develop an optimal one for English so that swiping has a 99.9% accuracy rate instead of what currently feels more like 90% or 95%.
90-95% is a very good estimate! That's about what we measure on our test set. I have good news for you, and we will have a blog post about it soon. Because of how our models are built, we are able to optimize for detection accuracy directly by constructing synthetic swipes on each layout for ~50k words, and then testing them through the model. We tested around 800,000 layouts this way.
The biggest issue with QWERTY is that there are far too many words that swipe colinear or obtuse angle letter trigrams. These are both hard to detect and frustrating for swipe users, because you can't clearly indicate the letters you're gesturing. Neural swipe models (at least ours) look for indicators in the gesture pattern that suggests a user was targeting a specific letter, rather than trying to match a gesture shape like algorithmic detection does.
The shape of the keyboard can significantly improve the way the gestures are formed so that there is better indication of letters. The model can still respond to dwell times because unlike shape matching it uses the temporal information. But dwell interrupts flow, and in my opinion should be minimized in swipe layouts.
How about context. We have these not-so-new gadgets made by design to predict the next word, I mean those LLMs... a local tiny model should be able to beat those dumb GBoard predictions any time (and a note for Google: if GBoard uses already such a local predictor, just throw it away, it's garbage)
The ContextLM model is a very small language model that is trained for a single language. It's used to improve the quality of predictions by eliminating nonsensical words given the preceding words in the sentence. It only requires text data for training.
> it doesn't deal well with doubled vs single letters, etc.
You mean like the two E’s in “feel” or the two L’s in “fell”? I just tried and it handles them well. Are you aware of the circling technique? When you want to double up on a letter, you briefly circle it slightly. I believe some keyboards let you hover momentarily without circling.
Try it, swipe F-E-L, it should complete to “fell”, then do the same thing again but form a small, tight circle over the E, it should then complete to “feel”. Works for me every time.
It does, actually. Do a loop around the doubled letter. It's a common swipe gesture on most keyboards, IIRC, for at least a decade. Not sure why it's hardly ever mentioned. iphones only got it a few years ago.
So for feel, you start at F, go to E, loop once, then L. For fell, start at F, go to E, then loop on L. Very easy to pick up as a physical habit.
I just tested those two on futo, and it easily picked them both out.
FWIW, I just switched to FUTO yesterday and (out of the box at least) it doesn't support this. With gboard, that works great, but with FUTO it does not.
I looked in the "Swipe Typing" options and there doesn't seem to be a config for it.
My guess is you are deleting the word each time. Unlike the FUTO keyboard, the iPhone keyboard will give you different results each time after you delete because it assumes that if you delete a word, it’s probably because the autocomplete got it wrong, so it gives you a different result on the next try.
A workaround is to use the Notes app and use the return key to make a new line after each try, rather than deleting. That should give you more consistent results.
I wouldn't mind if similar _common_ words are mixed up. But the current state of the iOS keyboard and also gBoard is that it sometimes just makes really unhinged suggestions (at least in my native german). Words I never used before and that I didn't even know existed. I think a small AI layer on top would probably fix that, just the likelihood of next words multiplied somehow with what I possible could have swiped.
My guess is that an AI layer already present _is_ the reason you're seeing these unhinged suggestions.
Earlier generation iOS keyboards were much more accurate and reasonable.
In German, it's also extremely annoying that even common compound words will not be suggested. Google Keyboard has somewhat improved here, but FUTO Keyboard still drops the ball on this completely.
What'd be nice for compound words particularly in German is a way to enter them separately and have them merge either automatically or as an option above the keyboard.
Eg enter Bürger Dienste and have it autocorrect to Bürgerdienste. Or even Führung Kraft and turn it into Führungskraft (inserting an s).
It has a similar sort of 'It doesn't have to have 26 keys on something the size and shape of a mobile 'phone.' thinking as 8vim has, whilst raising a good 'You know 'phones worked fine with a 3 by 4 grid for 60 years, ne?' point, but adding a modern twist of 'We can swipe, in the 21st century.' to the old notion of multiple letters on a button.
There are still these people thinking outside of the typewriter-keyboard-on-a-'phone box. (-:
Thumb-Key is awesome and I can't live without it. Clearflow sounds promising too, but I have to be able to write my,, repeated symbols and >:) smiley faces with the same speed and finesse as words (not having to thing about it at all).
But why would you want to? Pro-tip, I guess, ",," is normal in German and maybe other languages as a method of quoting, but it looks bizarre in English.
I really liked this in the day (and i just played with the version you linked and can still remember all the key patterns - I'm typing this comment with it now).
But it just can't touch swiping for speed. Frankly, the keyboard I miss most is the T9 predictive text from my old school pre smart phone era.
Nothing has come close to the same expressiveness and speed while being usable completely blind, only by feel.
I do feel like mobile keyboards have stagnated in a bad spot, though.
Correction seems so mutton handed - I don't understand why, when I position the cursor for a correction it doesn't stem/postfix the word to offer options.
In fact (with Gboard) the suggestions don't change with cursor position. Surely, when I place the cursor you the right of a letter I'm planning on removing that letter, or adding a letter, but the suggestions don't change according to cursor placement.
There's also no apparent frecency - I had to correct cursor every time.
I swiped "frecency" as "decency" - corrections offered were "d doubt difference". The swipes for those are wildly different. d->e is NNW (350°), d->i, d->o is ENE (~70°).
It's really so basic. Surely they can do better than this.
Back during my Palm Pilot days I’ve discovered the FITALY layout - optimised for pen input and one-finger typing. But it should work similarly efficient for swiping as the goal was to minimise travel between letters (in the English language).
Back when I was using QWERTY with Microsoft SwiftKey, I used to swipe a bit, but it never really felt comfortable for me. I've tried swiping again after switching to Colemak on my phone and everything is so close together that the accuracy is very low. I wonder if this model will help improve accuracy on other layouts too (or even languages!).
I hope FUTO does start caring about language support, because for example their AI powered text prediction is only available for English. I'd happily train a model for them in my native language if they provided instructions on how to do so. And I'd help with swipe typing too.
I've been using this keyboard on and off for a while now. I've always switched back to gboard, however this update made me convert full time. It's really good.
There are a few issues, like it randomly capitalizes words in the middle of sentences. Also, it doesn't seem to take context into account when suggesting words, so words that clearly wouldn't follow the last word will often show up.
It's not as good as gboard yet, but close enough that I'm going to stick with it.
Note that if you have a more powerful device, you can get larger models for voice and larger dictionaries from their site. They make a noticeable difference.
Which voice model are you using? I found that the english-74 is quite excellent. Used it to type this. Haven't seen the emoji issue with that model. Perhaps you're on english-39?
Awesome. I've been using FUTO keyboard for two years now and it's the best free & private keyboard I found, but swiping has been really bad for all these keyboards which was such a pain because I use swiping a lot.
Nice to see the hour of swiping I did adding to their dataset actually helped. I'm using it now and it feels as good as the Google keyboard.
Edit: It is sending me a little that it keeps swiping "whats" instead of "what's" though, hopefully they fix that later.
I'll look for a video. I like swyping because I can hold the phone in one hand and swipe with the thumb. The other hand is free. Two finger swiping would negate that advantage but maybe it opens up other usage scenarios.
I'm sorry, once you've tried it you may not be able to go back. For close to a decade have been using an unmaintained app called nintype that was apparently the inventor of two finger swipe until it stopped working on new android versions... Heliboard saved me from actual despair
To add to the license complexity, the model uses another FUTO-written license, though it at least does not seem as bad as the license for the keyboard:
The clause you cited as well as the "Termination" section and the non-commercial restriction make it a non-free license. Besides the direct issues with that, it also means all software covered by this license is unsuitable for FOSS-only distributions like Debian or F-Droid. It's not entirely clear to me if the license is copyleft; derivative works have similar problems if so.
As an aside, Eron Wolf, the billionaire behind FUTO, has some rather... out of touch views[0] on the meaning of open source, and seems very committed to diluting the term to mean something closer source-available by removing the most of the rights granted (as defined by FSF, OSI, DFSG and others).
Sorry, but really when it come to open source: money dont smell. If they do give money to real projects with OSI-approved licenses it doesnt matter to me what else they do, who their sponsors are, etc. Well unless they actually do something illegal.
This is because 99.9% open source projects not targeted enterprise never ever see more than $100 of donations and being maintainer of such software is literally thankless job that will never pay you anything.
Blaming organizations for giving money or maintainers for taking money is worse you can do no matter who sponsor is: FSF, FUTO, Cloudflare, Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle, DARPA or MAGA INC.
Dont like FUTO or its owner? Make a better fund, give your money to SFC, FSF or whatever open source sponsor organization is acceptible to you.
There is so little money in end-user open source software and making pie even smaller or antoganizing thankless people maintaining it is awful. Everyone doing this is either dumb, malicious or both.
eron/FUTO are not trying to dilute the term Open Source, they are trying to address a real problem that Free Software and Open Source face, and that we do need to find a solution for. their initial wording may not have been ideal, but that is because there is no defined terminology, and because the point is to be close to open source as is possible.
this is not an out of touch view. on the contrary. what is out of touch is to believe that Open Source is perfect as it is, and nothing should be changed about it.
the problem that FUTO is trying to address is the commercial exploitation by large companies (like AWS) at the expense of the original creators. a problem that several companies (redis, mongodb, elasticsearch, zerotier, terraform, vagrant, and many more...) in recent years had to face, causing them to change their license.
btw: i recently asked bruce about this and he said that AI now changes everything and he wants to wait and see how that will affect Open Source.
it is not obvious that FUTO's approach is the right one. it is an attempt at addressing the problem, and i expect that it will take more such experiments to shake out what the best approach to this problem really is.
Yeah, honestly. I love open source as much as the next guy, but I don't understand why people are so up in arms about this. The license feels pretty reasonable.
The source code is fully available, none of the features are paywalled. They only prohibit you from taking their code and reselling it.
If you take a look at the Play Store, there are thousands of instances where open source projects are lazily renamed and sold for $5 or $10. It's the definition of scummy, pathetic, worthless behavior, and I'm glad the license prevents those kinds of leeches from succeeding.
I know this isn't the only case, but it's the majority of cases. So I have no problem with their license at all.
The license doesn't prevent those leeches from succeeding. They will republish your app, whether it is fully proprietary or licensed under the GPLv3, and neither Google nor Apple will respond to takedown requests for apps. We get many reports of this behavior in an Android developer community I help moderate, it's pretty obvious there are a few known actors doing this with hundreds of apps, and the stores don't care.
Yeah, it's pretty pathetic on Google and Apple's part.
It might be not a foolproof solution, but I think the license is better than nothing. Then you have a legal precedent that you can cite when you file a lawsuit against these rats.
Most of these people doing this probably aren't in the same country. But whatever. It's better than nothing.
That said, if they ever implement e.g. license keys or some other mean of actually checking that you’ve paid, seems that you would be able to remove it and recompile, you just can’t help others do that:
> Notwithstanding the above, you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software related to payment to the Licensor in any copy you distribute to others.
It's just another proprietary software, on the lesser evil side of spectrum.
The reason for people being so up in arms about it, is because voting for lesser evil makes it greater.
The reason I prefer open-source software is that I can inspect and modify the source code if I want to. With this license, I can still do that, even if it’s not technically “open-source™” by the OSI definition. Therefore, I don’t see a reason to object to it. The OSI definition is made for the benefit of big corporations, not people like me.
Fun fact for the first apple keyboard layout on the first iphone, the touchscreen hadn't the resolution to tell appart which letter you meant to type in, so it changed dynamically the "hitboxes" of the letter buttons when you typed a certain letter. (for instance if you typed the letter "i", the hitbox of "t", and "n" were changed to be bigger, because there is a high probability you were hitting those next. Here is an article that talks about it : https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/26/creation-of-the-first-iphone...
>the touchscreen hadn't the resolution to tell appart which letter you meant to type in
Is that really true? My memory of the original iPhone's touch screen is that it was pretty much pixel-accurate.
The article mentions that the keyboard wasn't accurate enough: "But by early 2006, the iPhone keyboard still didn’t have the accuracy Apple needed to ship the phone." I don't think that means the screen wasn't accurate; all it means is that the original iPhone had a small screen, so the buttons on the keyboard were tiny, and hitting them precisely was difficult. That's why the hit boxes of more likely keys were enlarged.
I think OP is misremembering about the reason for the hit boxes.
The base reason is the size of the keyboard compared with the size of thumbs and the imprecision of thumb typing. Adjusting the hit boxes results in a better error rate. It isn’t because of the resolution of the screen or touch detection.
FUTO keyboard actually has an option for this (enabled by default) called "Smart key-hit detection". It adjusts hitboxes based on dictionary predictions for what you just typed.
im fairly sure gboard does the same thing. it will bias towards certain subsequent keys based on the current input. im sure there's a whole bunch of tricks keyboard apps use to make typing "feel" accurate.
Very cool. I'm a big fan of swipe. So much so that a bunch of us a Grammarly re-implemented it using a similar technique about 2 years ago on the Grammarly iOS keyboard, so if you want to experience something similar on iOS, you can head to the app store https://apps.apple.com/us/app/grammarly-ai-keyboard-notes/id... and use the qwerty english keyboard layout to get this neural net version of swipe.
One key difference is that the learned model does not decode in a context sensitive manner but does it a word at a time. The main reason is because we wanted to release this soon and wanted the user's personal dictionary (i.e. contact names, etc... to show up correctly when swiped). It would have been nice if we could have followed through with the context sensitive decoding as described by the FUTO folks. It would really help with accuracy when dealing with words like:
Tried Grammarly, could you possibly include a few more onboarding animations and reminders to upgrade to the paid version? I almost finished typing a word.
After experiencing Nintype on iOS many years ago, I can't use any other swipe keyboard anymore. I'm stuck using the stock keyboard for typing, and sometimes (rarely) swiping a word or two when I din't have two hands available. Swiping (with one finger) when holding my phone with both hands just feels unnatural and sluggish. I wish Apple had just bought/sherlocked Nintype and integrated it into the stock keyboard.
Omg I was using that too! I was actually wondering whether FUTO had any features that supported typing one word with multiple concurrent (or not) swipes. I guess it does not but dang what a blast from the past. I had forgotten the app name too! Was using it since before Apple started actually allowing third party keyboards officially
Completely agree! The author made a buggy android port of nintype (called keyboard 69) that I used for years. The UX was incredible, and every swipe system I've tried since feels downright clumsy by comparison. Two finger swipe is peak ergonomics, but unfortunately I think it's an innovation that's simply too niche.
Never heard of that one before, so I looked it up & watched a demo vid.
Aieeee!
I don't think I could ever learn to use that. I am from the 1990s fast-T9 entry era, and my thumb dexterity is poor. (And I'm left-handed with a badly-damaged right hand.)
I think this is a text entry method solely or primarily for the 2-thumb console-gamepad generation. (I find gamepads really hard to use, too. Give me a joystick, or mouse+WASD.)
I used nintype and keyboard69 for years, heliboard on f-droid supports two thumb swiping and works very well ! Not as good as nintype but extremely useful
edit: NOT guaranteed to be free and open! seems to have a confusing license setup. Boooo! Works good though, I'll take it over Gboard.
This is such a massive deal. This is, as far as I can tell, the first useful free and open Swipe model. This paves the way for things like swipe typing on platforms other than iOS and Android, a major pain point to newcomer OSes.
What I really want is a swipe model that can tune to multiple languages simultaneously when a keyboard layout can support it (English + German, German + French, etc). I rarely need more than 2 languages simultaneously, but the "switching between 2 languages" point is painful.
Trilingual here. Gboard on my pixel 10 pro does support swipe type while code switching between multiple languages. Works reasonably well. Accuracy is a bit lower for words that are collisions across languages
When you're multilingual, you'd switch between languages on the fly, mid-sentence even, just because the words in other language come to your mind quicker, seem to better match nuances, etc.
This would be cool. I suspect that people don't implement this model because it's a long tail of users requesting this. This is totally feasible technically.
What dictionary are you using? I installed the app on android and am not able to type "fuck", neither with the inbuilt dictionary nor from an imported English (UK) dictionary from their site. Even typing it manually doesn't seem to add it to the dictionary, which makes it really annoying to use.
I can't see what's wrong with that (you choose whether to accept suggestions or not), but you can always blacklist predictions by long-pressing on them.
It’s unfortunate that the Bing team at Microsoft has so much power. They destroy products for the glory of Bing, and some money. Perhaps it’s about the money. But I feel like Microsoft doesn’t have to make a lot of money on everything they do.
That's neat! Would love to try it, but am also on iOS :/
With the risk of sounding like a broken record - what are people using on iOS? I've been using `SwiftKey` for a while as it has dictionaries for languages that the native keyboard doesn't have. But I would love to switch to something else, as M$ has been shoving AI features on it that I am definitely not interested in.
So far in this thread I've seen Grammarly and Nintype. The former seems to suffer from the same things as SwiftKey, while the latter doesn't look it's maintained (last update 7y ago). I don't mind a paid app, as long as it doesn't invade my privacy.
Native iOS is significantly worse than SwiftKey and doesn't support multiple languages without having to switch the keyboard constantly. In SwiftKey you can mix languages.
I'd also be very interested in SwiftKey alternatives, since MS already almost killed it once.
It is indeed supported only for some languages - you can check the link for which ones. And it's not only about recognising multiple languages, but actual functionality that it's missing. It doesn't have a Bulgarian dictionary and support for swipe in BG, which is what I need...
swype was so good before it got destroyed by Nuance. Gboard's own swipe to type is decent but missing a lot of those features that made swype so much better (swipe once backwards to erase the previous word, loop a letter to double it, swipe up to the suggested word to select it, correct a previous word with the next few words context...)
It requires more precision than Swype, but GBoard supports multi-word word deletion if you swipe back originating from the backspace key. You get some haptic feedback, and can scrub to adjust the selected boundary.
Unfortunately some of those Swype nicities are patented [1], so other keyboards can't use them.
I feel like a clean room opensource keyboard could implement those without any patent liabilities. Software patents are notoriously difficult to enforce and I don't think nuance is spending any money enforcing this given they stopped swype in 2018.
For us sad iOS people, what's your favorite swiping keyboard? I just use the stock Apple one because custom keyboards can still be a little buggy (eg not loading occasionally).
For a long time apple keyboard did not support my language (czech), I would use gboard. And yes, it is still slightly better than the Apple one, but the switching is buggy and the problem is on the apple side.
Well, iOS swipe keyboard is not that bad. I would not call it “permanent suffering”. I tried gboard and swiftkey and they aren’t a giant improvement over the stock keyboard these days. They used to be.
Wrt the “occasional bug”, what happens is that sometimes (enough to make it bad) the keyboard doesn’t render at all!
What happens is you simply toggle the keyboard field off /on in th the same or a different app, a simple albeit slightly annoying fix.
But in general, there is no giant improvement, none of the major ones are even competent enough to figure out a grid of numbers is better than a row, but Apple is even worse - it doesn't even let you type a number on long hold, for some reason thinking that a letter ų you'll never type in your English life is a better alternative
To me, not being able to type in numbers easily is a permanent suffering, though ok, not the end of the world
And unfortunately don't think there is a single swipe keyboard that's properly customizable to fix those glaring issues...
Voice dictation is so much better than GBoard, which I've been using until now. It capitalizes and punctuates sentences without me needing to, and got several sentences perfect without any post-editing needed, and it's all a local model. The one downside is no real-time update, just batch conversion once you're done talking. Looks like they've fixed the swipe backspace and spacebar to not be over-sensitive like it was a year or two ago when I last tried (and allowed some customization).
It has gotten very good but my brain is much worse at producing intelligible speech than it is at writing. I end up having to edit a lot anyway, which is hard with voice.
I'm actually surprised with how bad is Google's voice recognition - with all their immense compute resources, R&D, owning Android, etc, what prevents them from having SotA voice recognition?.. Even "it's not a priority" argument doesn't work as they are pushing Gemini assistant. (ChatGPT app works so much better.)
Yep, and it's pretty bad. The only benefit is real-time, which is why I highlighted that FUTO lacks that. If it made as many errors as GBoard, it wouldn't be worth using.
I'm curious to see how it deals with dual languages - ie. not switching between them, but using two languages in the same sentence like the google keyboard supports out of the box.
my biggest issue is that i make up a lot of words as i type and the google dictionary for icelandic is .. well it can never be fully complete because of the way the language works, so dictionary words are always a mess.
They have a multilingual input mode that also works with swipe input! I've tried it briefly with Swedish/English on a Swedish keyboard and it switched between languages in the same sentence in a way that made sense to me, but I had to download a separate dictionary.
It would be nice if there was a swipe typing keyboard that was similar to Chinese/Japanese IMEs where you can swipe out a full phrase and the keyboard can use it to fix short/ambiguous words based on context. Today, when I'm swipe typing sloppily, it can be hard to distinguish between pairs like on/in, of/if/I'd, it's/its, etc
FUTO has gone from tolerable to pretty great over the past year-ish. Sure, the (english) auto-completion still may not be the "best," but I generally find it better than my iPad auto-completion. Thou, my fav-features are pretty simple: the ability to pin dedicated action buttons like undo/redo/select-all, and direct control over my clipboard history. The clipboard does come with hard max limits of 100 items and 336 hours, but since FUTO is open-source, all one has to do is clone, patch, compile, and voila, unlimited clipboard history! And they say dreams don't come true.
I always liked their voice dictation because it's better than Samsungs or Googles while it's on device. It's super fast and puts in punctuation in, etc.
The keyboard on the other hand I never really liked for some reason which I can't even explain clearly. So for the keyboard I've been using https://github.com/HeliBorg/HeliBoard for ever, but it does not have sviping.
I've been using FUTO voice input for several month. It's not perfect as I have to manually do the correction like always. However, it definitely saves me some time and effort. It also helps me to degoogle, starting from gboard.
Apparently this new swipe function is tied to FUTO keyboard. I don't use the FUTO keyboard as there is no support for the language I use intensively. Nevertheless, this line of work deserves more recognition.
Very cool, I use swipe typing almost exclusively so good to see open models. It just needs to preserve word history for custom words, not sure if it does that.
This is amazing! It's driven me nuts for a very long time that so many mobile keyboards allow totally non-sequitur nonsensical sequence completions.
In particular, if you end up using the voice input mode of it and have trouble with accuracy, I would giving a try to the biggest model that it supports. It's slower (although really not bad at all on my Galaxy Fold), but it's so nice to have it actually be as accurate as it is.
If only FUTO supported combined keyboard languages without duplicates. Why would there be two separate de and en layouts when multilingual typing is enabled.
I really want to switch to FUTO keyboard but there are a few UX issues that prevent me. For example, SwiftKey lets you swipe left to delete a word, which is very useful, but FUTO doesnt, you have to start from the Backspace button.
Or, SwiftKey will allow you to change a typed word's case by pressing shift, but FUTO just does nothing in that case.
I really hope these get fixed, or I can just issue PRs myself for them.
I've been using HeliBoard for a while now, but IIRC the swipe library it uses is from Google (have to install it separately to comply with license). Wonder how this stacks up.
I am a heliboard user myself and im only just trying this new keyboard out but at least right now it feels faster and has all the goodies I want in a soft keyboard.
1. super responsive
2. arrow keys!! why this is impossible is beyond me
3. easy access to text editor and undo redo via the long pressing of the enter button
4. easy resizing and im using a floating mode so it's all near my thumb and no awkward bends, just my phone being too heavy for my pinky because phones are massive these days
5. offline voice is comparable at a glance to the offline voice input app I was using with heliboard. that's with their biggest ugliest English model and my phone is from 2022 at the newest.
6. have I mentioned how performance is great on this app yet? pleasantly surprised.
I agree, it's by far the best mobile keyboard I've ever tried. I especially love the shortcuts for copy/paste/select all/cut which send the actual Ctrl-C. I can finally use terminals! :-P
Thanks for making this privacy-forward. I had been using Heliboard and then a kludge to get another language they don't support via Simple keyboard. It worked well as a workaround, and then an update last week broke my workaround.
Futo just has all the languages I need, and does a better job with EN swipe than Heliboard. 100% convert. Plus, learning about Clearflow is a game changer.
Must say it's a little bit lame that they are boycotting iOS. I will not change phone just to use this app but it would be nice to be able to replace SwiftKey with this.
I'm pretty sure there is no way for them to supply an ios version without having to go through some sort of apple approval process. hardly boycotting to say that you're not about to put up with that crap.
Don't they have to go through a Google approval process for (official) Android? I'm not sure I see this as a big win unless they are strictly supporting GrapheneOS and other de-Googled Androids.
they do, but it's on fdroid too - at that point the play store is simply a nice to have. if google does anything they don't like they can just say okay and keep publishing on fdroid, they have not lost whatever efforts they have invested into android. apple has absolutely no way to just publish an app and let people install it, which at least to my mind delegitimises them as a viable platform. I'm pretty sure if I made open source mobile apps they would be android only, people would be free to take the source and release an ios version under different branding.
It's notoriously not on f-droid. The way FUTO licenses and/or builds its thing is made deliberately incompatible with f-droid's main repository.
You can add the futo repository to the f-droid client, but when people talk about f-droid they really mean the main repository, not the extra hoops to add less trusted third parties.
sad, I didn't realise that because their website has an "install from f-droid" link. it does reinforce my point that android is a proper platform with a viable distribution mechanism though, if they can self host a third party repository.
Very nice. FUTO is the keyboard I keep recommending. The only thing missing now would be a decent dual-swipe support. Injecting single letters with taps during a swipe or continuing a swipe with another finger makes it even faster since it let's you avoid awkward long horizontal "detours" just to hit one letter.
I started using the main FUTO keyboard after seeing it mentioned here the other week.
Then a few days later I tried to open my HSBC banking app and it refused to open because it detected FUTO keyboard which it treated as an insecure application, so had to remove FUTO after a couple of days of use.
I can't speak for this keyboard, but at least on Gboard, if you type out a word a few times, it'll be stored in its suggestions dictionary and you'll be able to swipe type it.
This is great! As someone with one thumb that can't bend at either joint and another that doesn't bend well I've been a single finger typer on my phone. Thanks to all involved for this privacy respecting swipe keyboard!
Absolutely cool demo. I used to love this feature in SwiftKey. It still works but after their acquisition by Microsoft they've gone downhill. I've since switched to iOS but would love to try Futo out when it's available for iOS
Sounds good but the big problem I have with futo key board is that it can only do one language at a time. With gboard I can swipe type al 3 languages I speak without having to constantly switch. I wish they could make that.
Well neither is perfect. But I really need that multilingual typing. Constantly switching is so annoying. I won't use the FUTO one until it can do that. It's not some minor nice-to-have.
Gboard has obvious imperfections like data mining. Though on my phone I can just block its network access altogether which mitigates it a lot.
Lots to be desired, unfortunately. I tried 3 different words. It nailed the first 2 but the third was impossible: The word "serverside" is impossible to swipe. I tried 10x, never did it even come close.
I don't think server side is in their dict without a dash. I don't know how to type dashed words in swipe. SwiftKey cant do it either. Long words usually work very well though. That's most of what I use swipe for. Short words I tap, long words I swipe.
e.g.,
Broadside Surfside integration financially illiterate calibration fantastical proliferation haphazardly horrifically striations proliferation (all typed first or second try except antidisestablishmentarianism which admittedly I got carried away)
Interesting, I just tried it and it got server-side the first try, although it wants to insert a hyphen. I did download the larger dictionary from their site.
Looking at the example videos, specially the VR one, I can't help but think that this gives every word its own unique shape. For example, the word "model" got shape matching infinity symbol.
The first two words i tried to type were both "hello" and I got "help" and "hell" as first suggestions. I'm not sure if the web app is using the same algo but that's an immediate ick.
Is there some sort of swipe data standard? If there were, it feels like getting a few proper OSS projects going might start to shift things in the right direction (assuming they cracked a way to share a bit of anonymized data)
I've been using SwiftKey for 10 years (typing not swiping), and test ran FUTO for the last month.
FUTO improved a lot (I had tried it a year earlier also) but SwiftKey's suggestions are still a lot better in my opinion.
With SwiftKey I can just type roughly in the right spot without looking and the correct words will come out most of the time. FUTO still suggests a lot of nonsensical next words that just do not follow after the previous in English.
I hope it improves further so I can switch.
The voice models are great though, and they can be used as part of the keyboard or standalone.
I used to use SwiftKey, but Microsoft acquired and ruined it years ago. It worked really well. Since then the only one that worked for me is Gboard.
I've had this installed for a while but found the swiping too inaccurate. I'm trying it again now and I reckon it's as good as Gboard now. I've written this comment using it. Nice!
Edit: I've noticed that, like Gboard, it's still hard to type words like "fuck" or even "tits" etc. Are these words just missing from the dictionary? It's always felt like I'm not allowed to type them because I'm not a big boy. I don't type those particular words much, as it happens, but other missing words is annoying.
Gboard has been messing with the emoji search recently. It is worse.
Previously, if you type "fac" or "face" or "facep" or "facepa" or "palm" in the search box, you'd get the facepalm emoji among the results. Inexplicably, now the lying emoji, bacon, fondue are shown when you type "fac" but not the classic facepalm. It is only after you type "facepal" that the facepalm emoji appears in the results, which is a major... facepalm for the Gboard team.
As a parent, I need to _constantly_ send the facepalm emoji to my partner, so I noticed immediately when it recently changed. I think they're now trying to account for multiple languages, misspellings, a larger list of synonyms that allows partial matches, sentiment/meaning/synonyms, etc. In any case, I've always felt like emojis should be weighted by overall usage patterns (I have never used the fondue emoji and don't know anyone who does) and now they need a better search trie, where the facepalm emoji is in the top results of "fac".
I don't really get swiping. It's always going to be quicker and more efficient to type because you can use both hands, right? And you don't have to swipe your finger across the screen?
Still going strong with Fleksy even though you can't even download it anymore.
Sometimes you have one hand full. When my kids were small, especially, I REALLY benefited from swipe typing. I still often use it when I am holding something in one hand.
Maybe for you personally, but in a general sense I don't see how you can hold a phone and "use both hands" to type individual keys.
One notable advantage of swiping is that you can be quite loose with each single swipe gesture whereas you have to hit the right key many times for each word. That swipe is also usually much quicker than finding multiple keys for most people.
You preferences may reflect youth, eyesight, finger size, co-ordination, phone case usage or other advantages most people don't have.
I think it more likely reflects using bigger phones, where swiping across a while keyboard is quite slow, but also, I hate typing with two hands with any other app than Fleksy. You just have to hit within the general area of the key and it counts. I haven't had that kind of success with any other keyboard I've tried.
It traces back to accessibility. Think of folks with shaky hands. The screen helps to stabilize the tremors. A similar thing applies to typing on a bumpy bus or while walking.
That said, it also depends on screen size. Back when Swype first became popular, Android screen sizes ranged from 3-5". That was another factor driving it's popularity back in the day.
Definitely not for everyone or in every situation though
Swiping with one finger is faster than typing with two in my experience. But you can have best of both worlds, my keyboard let's me swipe with two fingers at the same time (heliboard on f-droid)
The thing is, with Fleksy, as long as you get within a few characters of the letter, it counts, and you also switch auto-correct choices by swiping up or swiping down, so you can fix them easily. It's a joy to type with 2 hands, honestly.
This is building on quick sand, a truly new model would not use the same dumb old grid that's neither fit for hands nor for fingers.
But kudos for the openness!
Seems like this is a new swipe model, though, so it should be more comparable. I also had to switch back to GBoard on GrapheneOS since I was spending more time fixing typos than actually typing with FUTO but I'm willing to give it another shot.
> Gboard swipe typing works flawlessly, FUTO still an Alpha project
I agree. I find that swipe typing on Gboard feels much better than FUTO's because I think it adapts to my typing style. I tried FUTO about six months ago, and it was a bit frustrating so I switched back to Gboard. Hopefully, it has improved since then, but I haven't checked.
The early iterations of swipe were very inaccurate, yes. But the newest swipe release mentioned here is much more mature.
It's not perfect, but it's practically on par with GBoard aside from a few blips here and there. It's enough for me to get rid of GBoard for good, and not consider reinstalling it.
I've been using it for a while. The insistence of keyboards on having a large bar of autocorrect suggestions taking valuable vertical space annoys me to no end.
I really liked using Fleksy which let you swipe up and down on the keyboard to change autocorrect results, including adding words to your dictionary. I'm still not sure if FUTO even has that option.
I used the FUTO keyboard for a few months but ditched it as the word suggestions were either odd or random (one example: I'd write 'Jordan' and it would always suggest 'Peterson' as the next word), and I'd got a weirdly passive aggressive prompt saying I should really purchase a license. Went back to the de-Googled Android keyboard in GrapheneOS
I think that, for it to learn a word, you need to actually press the middle suggestion, not just space. I'm not sure, though. Couldn't you add your surname as a custom word?
Just tried typing Jordan on mine, and my suggestions were "on", "is", and the Jordanian flag. So I'm pretty sure you had to have typed the words "Jordan Peterson" before for it to make that association.
The donation prompt can permanently disabled with two taps, so I'm not sure why that'd be a reason to abandon it. It's a complete non-issue.
"You've been using FUTO keyboard for X days. If you find this app useful, please consider paying to support future development.
FUTO is dedicated to making good software that doesn't abuse you. This app will never serve ads or collect your personal data."
I don't mean to be rude here, but this is an extremely bland, mild message. There's nothing passive aggressive about it in any way. What do you find aggressive about this?
If you'd prefer a swipe typing library under a truly open license, NLnet is funding [1] the creation of one by the HeliBoard [2] devs.
HeliBoard currently uses a proprietary library extracted from GBoard, which you need to add manually (since the app has no Internet connectivity out of principle), but they're asking for swipe data contributions, to be then distributed under CC-BY-SA 4.0, which'll be then utilized by their own open swipe library.
Check our more details here [3], [4] if you'd like to contribute.
I love swiping for speed, because it's usually faster than tapping and easy to do one-handed, but then there are always a bunch of words that are too similar that it can never get right, it doesn't deal well with doubled vs single letters, etc.
So for the longest time, I've wanted a new keyboard layout specifically designed for swiping. In the same way that Dvorak was optimized for ergonomically typing English words, I want a keyboard layout designed to minimize word overlap/ambiguity when swiping.
It doesn't even necessarily have to have 26 keys, e.g. maybe there could be one key overloaded for v/w/x/z (and you long-press it if you ever want to type a single letter). On the other hand, maybe there need to be separate keys for 'e' and 'ee', or a special key for "double the previous letter".
Because I love swiping, but all my problems with it come from the fact that the QWERTY layout is far from ideal for it. I am 100% willing to learn a new layout if anyone will develop an optimal one for English so that swiping has a 99.9% accuracy rate instead of what currently feels more like 90% or 95%.
FUTO Swipe supports ClearFlow, which is exactly what you are talking about, a keyboard layout optimized for swiping: https://clearflowkeyboard.github.io/
https://github.com/futo-org/futo-keyboard-layouts/issues/163
I switched to ClearFlow a month or two ago after learning of it on Hackernews. It is available in GBoard.
I'm happy with the switch. Like any keyboard switch (I've gone from Qwerty to Dvorak and now a Colemak-dh derivative with about ten years on each) it takes some time to learn the layout. Overall I'm happy with it though and there are less frustrating misinterpretations and corrections needed.
This post was swiped on it with only two corrections and the second one was my fault as i misremembered a key location.
If you don't mind, how do I get ClearFlow in gboard? GBoard on Android only has language selections, not keyboard selections.
There's a section [1] on the page that has instructions, and video [2] too. I had to select the English (US) language to get the option to select ClearFlow.
[1]: https://clearflowkeyboard.github.io/#section_activate [2]: https://youtu.be/rSfbvE9cEKE?si=NbJC93sTiOHqw4lX
Thanks. It's available only for the US layout, not UK.
I'm writing down a few impressions: - the layout is unusual, but I get the motivation. Distances are minimised and letters are arranged so that ambiguity is removed. - although I'm very slow, I haven't made a single mistake so far. Clearflow allows me to swipe much more accurately than stock gboard. - the square keyboard layout unfortunately means that half the letters are constantly hidden behind my thumb. As I'm unfamiliar with the layout, this means that before swiping a word, I have to look at the layout, memorise letter locations and plan the movement - since I write in multiple languages and Clearflow is available in only one of them, I would have to memorise a completely new layout for a language I write in only half the time.
Hi, Yes I'm in the same boat as you - had to switch to US language instead of UK. I've been addiing the anglisised versions of words to my dictionary as I go along so it's becoming less of an issue over time. Maybe I'll switch to FUTO in order to not have to deal with this anymore. Gboard has one nice feature though in that I have multiple languages enabled so I get correct predictive completion in non-English languages.
For learning ClearFlow, I used the Games app available from the "Clearflow Games" section on their website: https://clearflowkeyboard.github.io/
I also have the issue of the thumb getting in the way so I spent a couple of days playing the games to get my layout memory up and then it became usable without frustration and I'm not looking back now although I occasionally still forget the odd letter location.
FUTO has a "multilingual typing" setting, maybe that's what you're looking for?
Tap on the language, a scrollable list of layouts comes on top.
I learned something. Thank you
I have been a ClearFlow user for over a year now. Generally I like it, but there absolutely are still common words that are hard to input consistently. The THEA cluster has given me no shortage of problems. Still a fan though.
Thank you! That's amazing. I had no idea!
It's one of those things I've been wanting for a decade now, sounds like it's been around for about a year and a half.
Man, this is the kind of stuff I come to HN for.
EDIT: Ugh! I have an iPhone, and FUTO is Android-only, and ClearFlow is only available in the Android Gboard, not the iOS Gboard. :(
Does It work for non English languages?
[flagged]
I actually can't find the answer on either of the linked pages, so it would be good to know. And I think people's experience is more important than the claims in these discussions.
Me neither. I added clearflow on gboard for English (US), but it didn't give me the same option for German.
Only defined for the default, english charset: https://github.com/futo-org/futo-keyboard-layouts/blob/main/...
And anyway, there's no keyboard on earth who can handle multi-language typing in a sane way. They either mash all languages together, or force random layouts on you, or... I stuck with GBoard because I just hate it less than others, so when I found this topic I thought yay let's try - until I read it's only for English. So there.
I really like how gboard handles it. It figures out what language I'm typing from the first couple of words and prioritises those. This way I can even mix languages within the same sentence and it will still recommend the right ones. It's really really good.
Are you sure, like really sure you mean gboard? In my gboard I choose the language I want to type in, and that's the language for everything (settings, typing, recommendations...).
I'd like to know where did they get the stats ClearFlow mentions in their site (reducing backspace corrections by 37.5% and shortening finger gliding distance by 41.6%.) and see what method did they use to analyze those swipe patterns and create .
It could be interesting for applying it to different languages (or modified word corpus).
This is interesting. Though it doesn't seem like it'd translate well to a physical keyboard, leaving me with two different layouts to work with.
Maybe I'm mistaken though. Are there any physical clearflow keyboards? Are they any good, or does clearflow really only work well with swipe?
Using a physical clearflow keyboard sounds like a nightmare - they're just designed for very different input models
The thumb typing muscle memory does not translate to finger typing at all. Most Dvorak or Colemak users are comfortable using QWERTY on their phones. Clearflow really only works well with swipe.
No, not muscle memory, but at least the idea of knowing where keys are. I'd bet that non-qwerty typers mostly started with qwerty and possibly still need to use it on some occasions, so they remember.
I can't speak for everyone but I did an experiment to see if this was the case (I actually just wanted to switch to Colemak everywhere. But iOS doesn't support it natively and third party keyboard landscape is pretty bleak on iOS). I switched to Dvorak on my phone and got really comfortable with it. I was already comfortable with Colemak on my computer. Then I tried
1. Switching to Dvorak on my computer AND 2. Switching to Colemak on my phone
I already had a feeling that my Dvorak experience on phone wasn't gonna help typing in a physical keyboard and indeed that was the case. But also, the physical keyboard experience with Colemak didn't really help with thumb typing/swiping on the phone. On a physical keyboard, I can only type QWERTY at around 30WPM and Colemak at around 130WPM. However, on the phone QWERTY is my strongest layout (even when I can only type at around 50WPM with it).
Then there's the design philosophy. Colemak aggressively keeps the most used letters on the homerow. Paste a random Wikipedia article into this page and you'll see (https://www.patrick-wied.at/projects/heatmap-keyboard/ alternatively, here's the heatmap for the introduction to today's featured article about Augustus: https://postimg.cc/9RT8P4N6). On a phone this means that a lot of the times you'll be swiping back and forth horizontally. Resulting in identical swipe paths for a lot of common words.
And if Clearflow was ported to a physical keyboard, most of your fingers won't be doing any work and the active fingers will be doing weird tap dance. The position of spacebar (undoubtedly the most used key on the keyboard) to the sides where you'd be using your pinky would make it an RSI machine.
My point is that if you're comfortable with QWERTY on the phone, that's not because you're comfortable with QWERTY on the desktop. That's because you got used to QWERTY on the phone.
I'm using Colemak on my phone, but can't get used to it on my desktop, so I'm stuck with QWERTY! :D
interesting, tying this. thanks
> Because I love swiping, but all my problems with it come from the fact that the QWERTY layout is far from ideal for it. I am 100% willing to learn a new layout if anyone will develop an optimal one for English so that swiping has a 99.9% accuracy rate instead of what currently feels more like 90% or 95%.
90-95% is a very good estimate! That's about what we measure on our test set. I have good news for you, and we will have a blog post about it soon. Because of how our models are built, we are able to optimize for detection accuracy directly by constructing synthetic swipes on each layout for ~50k words, and then testing them through the model. We tested around 800,000 layouts this way.
The biggest issue with QWERTY is that there are far too many words that swipe colinear or obtuse angle letter trigrams. These are both hard to detect and frustrating for swipe users, because you can't clearly indicate the letters you're gesturing. Neural swipe models (at least ours) look for indicators in the gesture pattern that suggests a user was targeting a specific letter, rather than trying to match a gesture shape like algorithmic detection does.
The shape of the keyboard can significantly improve the way the gestures are formed so that there is better indication of letters. The model can still respond to dwell times because unlike shape matching it uses the temporal information. But dwell interrupts flow, and in my opinion should be minimized in swipe layouts.
How about context. We have these not-so-new gadgets made by design to predict the next word, I mean those LLMs... a local tiny model should be able to beat those dumb GBoard predictions any time (and a note for Google: if GBoard uses already such a local predictor, just throw it away, it's garbage)
From https://swipe.futo.tech/:
The ContextLM model is a very small language model that is trained for a single language. It's used to improve the quality of predictions by eliminating nonsensical words given the preceding words in the sentence. It only requires text data for training.
So it would need one model per language? Not impossible (for me)...
> it doesn't deal well with doubled vs single letters, etc.
You mean like the two E’s in “feel” or the two L’s in “fell”? I just tried and it handles them well. Are you aware of the circling technique? When you want to double up on a letter, you briefly circle it slightly. I believe some keyboards let you hover momentarily without circling.
Try it, swipe F-E-L, it should complete to “fell”, then do the same thing again but form a small, tight circle over the E, it should then complete to “feel”. Works for me every time.
It does, actually. Do a loop around the doubled letter. It's a common swipe gesture on most keyboards, IIRC, for at least a decade. Not sure why it's hardly ever mentioned. iphones only got it a few years ago.
So for feel, you start at F, go to E, loop once, then L. For fell, start at F, go to E, then loop on L. Very easy to pick up as a physical habit.
I just tested those two on futo, and it easily picked them both out.
I just horizontally backtrack my finger over the double letter. Easier to do and produces the same result.
FWIW, I just switched to FUTO yesterday and (out of the box at least) it doesn't support this. With gboard, that works great, but with FUTO it does not.
I looked in the "Swipe Typing" options and there doesn't seem to be a config for it.
On the iPhone at least, following your instructions, I got anything from ‘feel’ to ‘fell’ to ‘grok’ to ‘felt’.
Is it possible that your keyboard’s particular dictionary knows the words you’re more likely to use and adjusts for it?
Edit - Also got ‘grill’. Notice how the -t in felt and -I- in grill are not near path to L.
My guess is you are deleting the word each time. Unlike the FUTO keyboard, the iPhone keyboard will give you different results each time after you delete because it assumes that if you delete a word, it’s probably because the autocomplete got it wrong, so it gives you a different result on the next try.
A workaround is to use the Notes app and use the return key to make a new line after each try, rather than deleting. That should give you more consistent results.
I wouldn't mind if similar _common_ words are mixed up. But the current state of the iOS keyboard and also gBoard is that it sometimes just makes really unhinged suggestions (at least in my native german). Words I never used before and that I didn't even know existed. I think a small AI layer on top would probably fix that, just the likelihood of next words multiplied somehow with what I possible could have swiped.
My guess is that an AI layer already present _is_ the reason you're seeing these unhinged suggestions. Earlier generation iOS keyboards were much more accurate and reasonable.
In German, it's also extremely annoying that even common compound words will not be suggested. Google Keyboard has somewhat improved here, but FUTO Keyboard still drops the ball on this completely.
What'd be nice for compound words particularly in German is a way to enter them separately and have them merge either automatically or as an option above the keyboard.
Eg enter Bürger Dienste and have it autocorrect to Bürgerdienste. Or even Führung Kraft and turn it into Führungskraft (inserting an s).
Blast from the past here for you, probably not relevant any more, but a cool reimagining of gesture interfaces:
https://www.the8pen.com/
Edit: apparently there's a modern successor? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=inc.flide.vi8
If, as there, one swipe gesture per letter is allowable, rather than a gesture encompassing a whole word, then things like Thumb-Key become options.
* https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key
It has a similar sort of 'It doesn't have to have 26 keys on something the size and shape of a mobile 'phone.' thinking as 8vim has, whilst raising a good 'You know 'phones worked fine with a 3 by 4 grid for 60 years, ne?' point, but adding a modern twist of 'We can swipe, in the 21st century.' to the old notion of multiple letters on a button.
There are still these people thinking outside of the typewriter-keyboard-on-a-'phone box. (-:
Thumb-Key is awesome and I can't live without it. Clearflow sounds promising too, but I have to be able to write my,, repeated symbols and >:) smiley faces with the same speed and finesse as words (not having to thing about it at all).
But why would you want to? Pro-tip, I guess, ",," is normal in German and maybe other languages as a method of quoting, but it looks bizarre in English.
I really liked this in the day (and i just played with the version you linked and can still remember all the key patterns - I'm typing this comment with it now).
But it just can't touch swiping for speed. Frankly, the keyboard I miss most is the T9 predictive text from my old school pre smart phone era.
Nothing has come close to the same expressiveness and speed while being usable completely blind, only by feel.
I do feel like mobile keyboards have stagnated in a bad spot, though.
I should have guessed. Of course someone has done this. (-:
* https://github.com/sspanak/tt9
Correction seems so mutton handed - I don't understand why, when I position the cursor for a correction it doesn't stem/postfix the word to offer options.
In fact (with Gboard) the suggestions don't change with cursor position. Surely, when I place the cursor you the right of a letter I'm planning on removing that letter, or adding a letter, but the suggestions don't change according to cursor placement.
There's also no apparent frecency - I had to correct cursor every time.
I swiped "frecency" as "decency" - corrections offered were "d doubt difference". The swipes for those are wildly different. d->e is NNW (350°), d->i, d->o is ENE (~70°).
It's really so basic. Surely they can do better than this.
Back during my Palm Pilot days I’ve discovered the FITALY layout - optimised for pen input and one-finger typing. But it should work similarly efficient for swiping as the goal was to minimise travel between letters (in the English language).
http://www.fitaly.com/fitaly/fitaly.htm
However, there’s no Fitaly keyboard available for modern phone OSes.
Back when I was using QWERTY with Microsoft SwiftKey, I used to swipe a bit, but it never really felt comfortable for me. I've tried swiping again after switching to Colemak on my phone and everything is so close together that the accuracy is very low. I wonder if this model will help improve accuracy on other layouts too (or even languages!).
I hope FUTO does start caring about language support, because for example their AI powered text prediction is only available for English. I'd happily train a model for them in my native language if they provided instructions on how to do so. And I'd help with swipe typing too.
Have you ever tried:
http://networkimprov.net/alphatap/light.html
It was set up for just this.
c.f., the opensource research project Dasher
https://www.inference.org.uk/dasher/
I have been wanting this for a while. I currently use dvorak with the split mode that happens when the phone is horizontal for good typing speed.
Same. I don't think I have many words that get misinterpreted at all, though pretty almost always does (as pet).
I've been using this keyboard on and off for a while now. I've always switched back to gboard, however this update made me convert full time. It's really good.
There are a few issues, like it randomly capitalizes words in the middle of sentences. Also, it doesn't seem to take context into account when suggesting words, so words that clearly wouldn't follow the last word will often show up.
It's not as good as gboard yet, but close enough that I'm going to stick with it.
Note that if you have a more powerful device, you can get larger models for voice and larger dictionaries from their site. They make a noticeable difference.
The only fundamental issue I have with it, they seem to be ideologically opposed to adding a GIF search, which I miss occasionally. https://github.com/futo-org/android-keyboard/issues/293#issu...
We sound similar. I have found that the voice to text can often just randomly start spitting out emojis. Did you find that?
Which voice model are you using? I found that the english-74 is quite excellent. Used it to type this. Haven't seen the emoji issue with that model. Perhaps you're on english-39?
https://keyboard.futo.org/voice-input-models
Good. That's a silly thing to have in a keyboard. No silly childish gifs that I can accidentally click on is a great feature.
worse, there's silly keys you can accidentally click and type out flibbertigibbet. very childish
Ah, a refined gentleman, more mature than Swiss cheese.
Awesome. I've been using FUTO keyboard for two years now and it's the best free & private keyboard I found, but swiping has been really bad for all these keyboards which was such a pain because I use swiping a lot.
Nice to see the hour of swiping I did adding to their dataset actually helped. I'm using it now and it feels as good as the Google keyboard.
Edit: It is sending me a little that it keeps swiping "whats" instead of "what's" though, hopefully they fix that later.
Heliboard has had great swipe for a while and has two finger swipe which is killer feature
I'll look for a video. I like swyping because I can hold the phone in one hand and swipe with the thumb. The other hand is free. Two finger swiping would negate that advantage but maybe it opens up other usage scenarios.
Its optional! One finger swipe on heliboard works at least as well as gboard or this futo one.
Mind blown. And brain broken as I try to swipe with two fingers
I'm sorry, once you've tried it you may not be able to go back. For close to a decade have been using an unmaintained app called nintype that was apparently the inventor of two finger swipe until it stopped working on new android versions... Heliboard saved me from actual despair
For anyone wondering: the library uses the GPLv3 (good) while the Android keyboard uses the Futo License (shit).
- https://gitlab.futo.org/keyboard/swipe-library/-/blob/master...
- https://github.com/futo-org/android-keyboard/blob/master/LIC...
To add to the license complexity, the model uses another FUTO-written license, though it at least does not seem as bad as the license for the keyboard:
https://huggingface.co/futo-org/futo-swipe/blob/main/LICENSE...
What's particularly objectionable about the Futo License?
Is it this part?
you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software related to payment to the Licensor in any copy you distribute to others.
The clause you cited as well as the "Termination" section and the non-commercial restriction make it a non-free license. Besides the direct issues with that, it also means all software covered by this license is unsuitable for FOSS-only distributions like Debian or F-Droid. It's not entirely clear to me if the license is copyleft; derivative works have similar problems if so.
As an aside, Eron Wolf, the billionaire behind FUTO, has some rather... out of touch views[0] on the meaning of open source, and seems very committed to diluting the term to mean something closer source-available by removing the most of the rights granted (as defined by FSF, OSI, DFSG and others).
[0]: https://gitlab.futo.org/eron/public/-/wikis/Thoughts-on-Open... - please keep in mind that the RMS quote at the top is taken out of context; he is arguing for more freedom, not less
FUTO also funds some actually open source projects like Immich so not everything about them is bad.
Related reading: https://drewdevault.com/blog/Whats-up-with-FUTO/
Sorry, but really when it come to open source: money dont smell. If they do give money to real projects with OSI-approved licenses it doesnt matter to me what else they do, who their sponsors are, etc. Well unless they actually do something illegal.
This is because 99.9% open source projects not targeted enterprise never ever see more than $100 of donations and being maintainer of such software is literally thankless job that will never pay you anything.
Blaming organizations for giving money or maintainers for taking money is worse you can do no matter who sponsor is: FSF, FUTO, Cloudflare, Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle, DARPA or MAGA INC.
Dont like FUTO or its owner? Make a better fund, give your money to SFC, FSF or whatever open source sponsor organization is acceptible to you.
There is so little money in end-user open source software and making pie even smaller or antoganizing thankless people maintaining it is awful. Everyone doing this is either dumb, malicious or both.
Excellent find.
They also employ Louis Rossman, interestingly.
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/FUTO
they employed Louis Rossman, he is no longer working for them as of Feb 2025 (according to his LinkedIn)
eron/FUTO are not trying to dilute the term Open Source, they are trying to address a real problem that Free Software and Open Source face, and that we do need to find a solution for. their initial wording may not have been ideal, but that is because there is no defined terminology, and because the point is to be close to open source as is possible.
this is not an out of touch view. on the contrary. what is out of touch is to believe that Open Source is perfect as it is, and nothing should be changed about it.
the problem that FUTO is trying to address is the commercial exploitation by large companies (like AWS) at the expense of the original creators. a problem that several companies (redis, mongodb, elasticsearch, zerotier, terraform, vagrant, and many more...) in recent years had to face, causing them to change their license.
it's a problem that bruce perens is also trying to address: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783500 "What comes after open source? Bruce Perens is working on it"
btw: i recently asked bruce about this and he said that AI now changes everything and he wants to wait and see how that will affect Open Source.
it is not obvious that FUTO's approach is the right one. it is an attempt at addressing the problem, and i expect that it will take more such experiments to shake out what the best approach to this problem really is.
i wrote about this before:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=em-bee%20futo&type=comment
> shit
It's just a commercial license with very mild terms.
Yeah, honestly. I love open source as much as the next guy, but I don't understand why people are so up in arms about this. The license feels pretty reasonable.
The source code is fully available, none of the features are paywalled. They only prohibit you from taking their code and reselling it.
If you take a look at the Play Store, there are thousands of instances where open source projects are lazily renamed and sold for $5 or $10. It's the definition of scummy, pathetic, worthless behavior, and I'm glad the license prevents those kinds of leeches from succeeding.
I know this isn't the only case, but it's the majority of cases. So I have no problem with their license at all.
The license doesn't prevent those leeches from succeeding. They will republish your app, whether it is fully proprietary or licensed under the GPLv3, and neither Google nor Apple will respond to takedown requests for apps. We get many reports of this behavior in an Android developer community I help moderate, it's pretty obvious there are a few known actors doing this with hundreds of apps, and the stores don't care.
So no, the license doesn't matter.
Yeah, it's pretty pathetic on Google and Apple's part.
It might be not a foolproof solution, but I think the license is better than nothing. Then you have a legal precedent that you can cite when you file a lawsuit against these rats.
Most of these people doing this probably aren't in the same country. But whatever. It's better than nothing.
> They only prohibit you from taking their code and reselling it.
They prohibit you from removing the constant nags about buying a licence.
I know a way you could remove those nags.
I know two:
1. Paying and clicking “I paid”
2. Not paying and still clicking “I paid”
So it’s an honour system right now.
That said, if they ever implement e.g. license keys or some other mean of actually checking that you’ve paid, seems that you would be able to remove it and recompile, you just can’t help others do that:
> Notwithstanding the above, you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software related to payment to the Licensor in any copy you distribute to others.
(IANAL)
The nags that you could just click "I bought a license" to remove without actually buying one?
Or you know, also buy the license and click it honestly.
It's just another proprietary software, on the lesser evil side of spectrum. The reason for people being so up in arms about it, is because voting for lesser evil makes it greater.
The reason I prefer open-source software is that I can inspect and modify the source code if I want to. With this license, I can still do that, even if it’s not technically “open-source™” by the OSI definition. Therefore, I don’t see a reason to object to it. The OSI definition is made for the benefit of big corporations, not people like me.
> Futo License (shit)
Clearly not a cuck license (https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-i-use-the-gpl-and-not-cuc...) so looks good to me.
Fun fact for the first apple keyboard layout on the first iphone, the touchscreen hadn't the resolution to tell appart which letter you meant to type in, so it changed dynamically the "hitboxes" of the letter buttons when you typed a certain letter. (for instance if you typed the letter "i", the hitbox of "t", and "n" were changed to be bigger, because there is a high probability you were hitting those next. Here is an article that talks about it : https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/26/creation-of-the-first-iphone...
>the touchscreen hadn't the resolution to tell appart which letter you meant to type in
Is that really true? My memory of the original iPhone's touch screen is that it was pretty much pixel-accurate.
The article mentions that the keyboard wasn't accurate enough: "But by early 2006, the iPhone keyboard still didn’t have the accuracy Apple needed to ship the phone." I don't think that means the screen wasn't accurate; all it means is that the original iPhone had a small screen, so the buttons on the keyboard were tiny, and hitting them precisely was difficult. That's why the hit boxes of more likely keys were enlarged.
I think OP is misremembering about the reason for the hit boxes.
The base reason is the size of the keyboard compared with the size of thumbs and the imprecision of thumb typing. Adjusting the hit boxes results in a better error rate. It isn’t because of the resolution of the screen or touch detection.
FUTO keyboard actually has an option for this (enabled by default) called "Smart key-hit detection". It adjusts hitboxes based on dictionary predictions for what you just typed.
im fairly sure gboard does the same thing. it will bias towards certain subsequent keys based on the current input. im sure there's a whole bunch of tricks keyboard apps use to make typing "feel" accurate.
Very cool. I'm a big fan of swipe. So much so that a bunch of us a Grammarly re-implemented it using a similar technique about 2 years ago on the Grammarly iOS keyboard, so if you want to experience something similar on iOS, you can head to the app store https://apps.apple.com/us/app/grammarly-ai-keyboard-notes/id... and use the qwerty english keyboard layout to get this neural net version of swipe.
See https://www.grammarly.com/blog/engineering/deep-learning-swi... for more details - it's very similar to the architecture described by the FUTO folks.
One key difference is that the learned model does not decode in a context sensitive manner but does it a word at a time. The main reason is because we wanted to release this soon and wanted the user's personal dictionary (i.e. contact names, etc... to show up correctly when swiped). It would have been nice if we could have followed through with the context sensitive decoding as described by the FUTO folks. It would really help with accuracy when dealing with words like:
1. (food, good, hood) 2. (you, toy, rot) 3. (our, or, it) etc...
(Disclaimer: I am one of the authors of the Grammarly swipe system as described in the linked blog post).
Tried Grammarly, could you possibly include a few more onboarding animations and reminders to upgrade to the paid version? I almost finished typing a word.
After experiencing Nintype on iOS many years ago, I can't use any other swipe keyboard anymore. I'm stuck using the stock keyboard for typing, and sometimes (rarely) swiping a word or two when I din't have two hands available. Swiping (with one finger) when holding my phone with both hands just feels unnatural and sluggish. I wish Apple had just bought/sherlocked Nintype and integrated it into the stock keyboard.
Omg I was using that too! I was actually wondering whether FUTO had any features that supported typing one word with multiple concurrent (or not) swipes. I guess it does not but dang what a blast from the past. I had forgotten the app name too! Was using it since before Apple started actually allowing third party keyboards officially
Heliboard on f-droid does two thumb swiping!
Looks like they are working on multi-finger swipe for the keyboard, the library seems to support it [0].
> The library also supports recognizing two-finger simultaneous swipe input through the SwipeEngine::recognize_multi method.
[0]: https://gitlab.futo.org/keyboard/swipe-library#inputs
Completely agree! The author made a buggy android port of nintype (called keyboard 69) that I used for years. The UX was incredible, and every swipe system I've tried since feels downright clumsy by comparison. Two finger swipe is peak ergonomics, but unfortunately I think it's an innovation that's simply too niche.
Never heard of that one before, so I looked it up & watched a demo vid.
Aieeee!
I don't think I could ever learn to use that. I am from the 1990s fast-T9 entry era, and my thumb dexterity is poor. (And I'm left-handed with a badly-damaged right hand.)
I think this is a text entry method solely or primarily for the 2-thumb console-gamepad generation. (I find gamepads really hard to use, too. Give me a joystick, or mouse+WASD.)
I used nintype and keyboard69 for years, heliboard on f-droid supports two thumb swiping and works very well ! Not as good as nintype but extremely useful
Heliboard (f-droid) supports two thumb swipe! Not as good as nintype but works very well
Yes! Nintype is incredible and is the only reason I refuse to upgrade my phone.
Futo with the new swipe model is the first android keyboard i've used that I don't feel like i'm compromising vs GBoard.
Integrated speak to text, good autocorrect typing, good autocorrect swiping.
edit: NOT guaranteed to be free and open! seems to have a confusing license setup. Boooo! Works good though, I'll take it over Gboard.
This is such a massive deal. This is, as far as I can tell, the first useful free and open Swipe model. This paves the way for things like swipe typing on platforms other than iOS and Android, a major pain point to newcomer OSes.
What I really want is a swipe model that can tune to multiple languages simultaneously when a keyboard layout can support it (English + German, German + French, etc). I rarely need more than 2 languages simultaneously, but the "switching between 2 languages" point is painful.
Trilingual here. Gboard on my pixel 10 pro does support swipe type while code switching between multiple languages. Works reasonably well. Accuracy is a bit lower for words that are collisions across languages
What is "code switching"?
When you're multilingual, you'd switch between languages on the fly, mid-sentence even, just because the words in other language come to your mind quicker, seem to better match nuances, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching
Yes, this is a showstopper for me. Preciso escrever in several languages.
schon claro
This would be cool. I suspect that people don't implement this model because it's a long tail of users requesting this. This is totally feasible technically.
This keyboard seems to ship with a dictionary that includes a lot of curse words. No more ducking around.
What dictionary are you using? I installed the app on android and am not able to type "fuck", neither with the inbuilt dictionary nor from an imported English (UK) dictionary from their site. Even typing it manually doesn't seem to add it to the dictionary, which makes it really annoying to use.
I can't see what's wrong with that (you choose whether to accept suggestions or not), but you can always blacklist predictions by long-pressing on them.
Great timing given I just installed SwiftKey since Microsoft has started embedding ads and dark pattern redirects to Bing!
You meant uninstalled, right ?
It’s unfortunate that the Bing team at Microsoft has so much power. They destroy products for the glory of Bing, and some money. Perhaps it’s about the money. But I feel like Microsoft doesn’t have to make a lot of money on everything they do.
Has to be. I jumped from SwiftKey the moment I heard Microsoft bought it, back in '14 IIRC.
Hahaha, yes. Though now I'm imagining an incredible alternative world where I only install the most enshittified pieces of software.
Assuming you mean uninstall, yeah I did the same because of that.
I wasn getting a constant panel from them regarding using the backup feature, that will just keep re appearing.
It was so bad I even moved to GBoard. Not the same, but I'm getting used to.
That's neat! Would love to try it, but am also on iOS :/
With the risk of sounding like a broken record - what are people using on iOS? I've been using `SwiftKey` for a while as it has dictionaries for languages that the native keyboard doesn't have. But I would love to switch to something else, as M$ has been shoving AI features on it that I am definitely not interested in.
So far in this thread I've seen Grammarly and Nintype. The former seems to suffer from the same things as SwiftKey, while the latter doesn't look it's maintained (last update 7y ago). I don't mind a paid app, as long as it doesn't invade my privacy.
What do you mean? iOS has a native swift option.
Native iOS is significantly worse than SwiftKey and doesn't support multiple languages without having to switch the keyboard constantly. In SwiftKey you can mix languages.
I'd also be very interested in SwiftKey alternatives, since MS already almost killed it once.
I have two languages defined in iOS (English and French) and the native swift keyboard recognizes which language I'm swifting in.
Pretty much what `cloogshicer` said.
I am interested in something that has support for multiple languages + swipe support.
iOS has that.
Mate...it does not, it's not like I haven't tried. Try to set Bulgarian keyboard on the native iOS and let me know exactly what you see.
https://www.apple.com/uk/ios/feature-availability/#quicktype...
I have two languages defined in iOS (English and French) and the native swift keyboard recognizes which language I'm swifting in.
Maybe this is supported only for specific language combinations.
It is indeed supported only for some languages - you can check the link for which ones. And it's not only about recognising multiple languages, but actual functionality that it's missing. It doesn't have a Bulgarian dictionary and support for swipe in BG, which is what I need...
swype was so good before it got destroyed by Nuance. Gboard's own swipe to type is decent but missing a lot of those features that made swype so much better (swipe once backwards to erase the previous word, loop a letter to double it, swipe up to the suggested word to select it, correct a previous word with the next few words context...)
It requires more precision than Swype, but GBoard supports multi-word word deletion if you swipe back originating from the backspace key. You get some haptic feedback, and can scrub to adjust the selected boundary.
Unfortunately some of those Swype nicities are patented [1], so other keyboards can't use them.
[1]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7098896B2/en
I feel like a clean room opensource keyboard could implement those without any patent liabilities. Software patents are notoriously difficult to enforce and I don't think nuance is spending any money enforcing this given they stopped swype in 2018.
They're now owned by infamously-litigious Microsoft.
> swype was so good before it got destroyed by Nuance.
100% this. THE best text-entry method for touchscreens. Nuance enshittified it and then Microsoft killed it.
https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2022/06/06/microsofts-sw...
For us sad iOS people, what's your favorite swiping keyboard? I just use the stock Apple one because custom keyboards can still be a little buggy (eg not loading occasionally).
I still use Gboard. It's pretty old now and hasn't been updated in a long time, but it still works.
Every year, I try the stock iOS keyboard, but then I always go back.
I found GBoard crashed often but was very good and had the wonderful built-in calculator, not available on Android anymore. Still the case?
Boy did I hate when a "secure" input came up and I was forced to use the default keyboard.
For a long time apple keyboard did not support my language (czech), I would use gboard. And yes, it is still slightly better than the Apple one, but the switching is buggy and the problem is on the apple side.
They didn’t support Czech?! Until what year?
I am not quite sure, like 2-4 years ago.
Occasional bug is worse than permanent suffering?
Well, iOS swipe keyboard is not that bad. I would not call it “permanent suffering”. I tried gboard and swiftkey and they aren’t a giant improvement over the stock keyboard these days. They used to be.
Wrt the “occasional bug”, what happens is that sometimes (enough to make it bad) the keyboard doesn’t render at all!
What happens is you simply toggle the keyboard field off /on in th the same or a different app, a simple albeit slightly annoying fix.
But in general, there is no giant improvement, none of the major ones are even competent enough to figure out a grid of numbers is better than a row, but Apple is even worse - it doesn't even let you type a number on long hold, for some reason thinking that a letter ų you'll never type in your English life is a better alternative
To me, not being able to type in numbers easily is a permanent suffering, though ok, not the end of the world
And unfortunately don't think there is a single swipe keyboard that's properly customizable to fix those glaring issues...
Voice dictation is so much better than GBoard, which I've been using until now. It capitalizes and punctuates sentences without me needing to, and got several sentences perfect without any post-editing needed, and it's all a local model. The one downside is no real-time update, just batch conversion once you're done talking. Looks like they've fixed the swipe backspace and spacebar to not be over-sensitive like it was a year or two ago when I last tried (and allowed some customization).
It has gotten very good but my brain is much worse at producing intelligible speech than it is at writing. I end up having to edit a lot anyway, which is hard with voice.
I'm actually surprised with how bad is Google's voice recognition - with all their immense compute resources, R&D, owning Android, etc, what prevents them from having SotA voice recognition?.. Even "it's not a priority" argument doesn't work as they are pushing Gemini assistant. (ChatGPT app works so much better.)
gboard has voice dictation and it has real-time update
Yep, and it's pretty bad. The only benefit is real-time, which is why I highlighted that FUTO lacks that. If it made as many errors as GBoard, it wouldn't be worth using.
No it's pretty good. Pretty much always accurate. Was that years ago? Or are you talking about languages with less resources?
I'm curious to see how it deals with dual languages - ie. not switching between them, but using two languages in the same sentence like the google keyboard supports out of the box.
my biggest issue is that i make up a lot of words as i type and the google dictionary for icelandic is .. well it can never be fully complete because of the way the language works, so dictionary words are always a mess.
> because of the way the language works
What's the problem of Icelandic? Is it because you stick words together like in Danish or German?
They have a multilingual input mode that also works with swipe input! I've tried it briefly with Swedish/English on a Swedish keyboard and it switched between languages in the same sentence in a way that made sense to me, but I had to download a separate dictionary.
It would be nice if there was a swipe typing keyboard that was similar to Chinese/Japanese IMEs where you can swipe out a full phrase and the keyboard can use it to fix short/ambiguous words based on context. Today, when I'm swipe typing sloppily, it can be hard to distinguish between pairs like on/in, of/if/I'd, it's/its, etc
FUTO has gone from tolerable to pretty great over the past year-ish. Sure, the (english) auto-completion still may not be the "best," but I generally find it better than my iPad auto-completion. Thou, my fav-features are pretty simple: the ability to pin dedicated action buttons like undo/redo/select-all, and direct control over my clipboard history. The clipboard does come with hard max limits of 100 items and 336 hours, but since FUTO is open-source, all one has to do is clone, patch, compile, and voila, unlimited clipboard history! And they say dreams don't come true.
As a FUTO keyboard user for about a year I'm quite excited for this!
Their local voice transcription is top notch and proper swipe gestures would be icing on the cake.
Now to fix that issue there tapping "Tuesd" sometimes suggests "Thursday"
I always liked their voice dictation because it's better than Samsungs or Googles while it's on device. It's super fast and puts in punctuation in, etc.
The keyboard on the other hand I never really liked for some reason which I can't even explain clearly. So for the keyboard I've been using https://github.com/HeliBorg/HeliBoard for ever, but it does not have sviping.
I might try FUTO Swipe just to test it.
Heliboard does have swiping! You just have to manually download the GBoard swiping library and upload it in the app.
Not only does heliboard have swiping, it has two finger swipe, which is more than 2x better than one finger swipe!
I've been using FUTO voice input for several month. It's not perfect as I have to manually do the correction like always. However, it definitely saves me some time and effort. It also helps me to degoogle, starting from gboard.
Apparently this new swipe function is tied to FUTO keyboard. I don't use the FUTO keyboard as there is no support for the language I use intensively. Nevertheless, this line of work deserves more recognition.
Very cool, I use swipe typing almost exclusively so good to see open models. It just needs to preserve word history for custom words, not sure if it does that.
This is amazing! It's driven me nuts for a very long time that so many mobile keyboards allow totally non-sequitur nonsensical sequence completions.
In particular, if you end up using the voice input mode of it and have trouble with accuracy, I would giving a try to the biggest model that it supports. It's slower (although really not bad at all on my Galaxy Fold), but it's so nice to have it actually be as accurate as it is.
Do they still have that issue where it will randomly spit out a string of emojis when using voice to text?
Not for me so far!
I settled on the middle model.
If only FUTO supported combined keyboard languages without duplicates. Why would there be two separate de and en layouts when multilingual typing is enabled.
I really want to switch to FUTO keyboard but there are a few UX issues that prevent me. For example, SwiftKey lets you swipe left to delete a word, which is very useful, but FUTO doesnt, you have to start from the Backspace button.
Or, SwiftKey will allow you to change a typed word's case by pressing shift, but FUTO just does nothing in that case.
I really hope these get fixed, or I can just issue PRs myself for them.
Ah nice they do have a VR demo https://swipe.futo.tech/vr-swipe-small.mp4 ... now I'm wondering if there is a WASM version so that it can be used in WebXR.
Apparently ExecuTorch has a WASM backend, could work to load the model this way.
Docs https://github.com/pytorch/executorch/tree/main/examples/was...
Love swipe typing. Nice to see more keyboards in the space.
I've been using the new swipe for a few days and it's truly excellent.
I've been using HeliBoard for a while now, but IIRC the swipe library it uses is from Google (have to install it separately to comply with license). Wonder how this stacks up.
I am a heliboard user myself and im only just trying this new keyboard out but at least right now it feels faster and has all the goodies I want in a soft keyboard.
1. super responsive
2. arrow keys!! why this is impossible is beyond me
3. easy access to text editor and undo redo via the long pressing of the enter button
4. easy resizing and im using a floating mode so it's all near my thumb and no awkward bends, just my phone being too heavy for my pinky because phones are massive these days
5. offline voice is comparable at a glance to the offline voice input app I was using with heliboard. that's with their biggest ugliest English model and my phone is from 2022 at the newest.
6. have I mentioned how performance is great on this app yet? pleasantly surprised.
y'all do you but I am keeping this FUTO keyboard.
I agree, it's by far the best mobile keyboard I've ever tried. I especially love the shortcuts for copy/paste/select all/cut which send the actual Ctrl-C. I can finally use terminals! :-P
Thanks for making this privacy-forward. I had been using Heliboard and then a kludge to get another language they don't support via Simple keyboard. It worked well as a workaround, and then an update last week broke my workaround.
Futo just has all the languages I need, and does a better job with EN swipe than Heliboard. 100% convert. Plus, learning about Clearflow is a game changer.
Must say it's a little bit lame that they are boycotting iOS. I will not change phone just to use this app but it would be nice to be able to replace SwiftKey with this.
I'm pretty sure there is no way for them to supply an ios version without having to go through some sort of apple approval process. hardly boycotting to say that you're not about to put up with that crap.
Don't they have to go through a Google approval process for (official) Android? I'm not sure I see this as a big win unless they are strictly supporting GrapheneOS and other de-Googled Androids.
they do, but it's on fdroid too - at that point the play store is simply a nice to have. if google does anything they don't like they can just say okay and keep publishing on fdroid, they have not lost whatever efforts they have invested into android. apple has absolutely no way to just publish an app and let people install it, which at least to my mind delegitimises them as a viable platform. I'm pretty sure if I made open source mobile apps they would be android only, people would be free to take the source and release an ios version under different branding.
> they do, but it's on fdroid too
It's notoriously not on f-droid. The way FUTO licenses and/or builds its thing is made deliberately incompatible with f-droid's main repository.
You can add the futo repository to the f-droid client, but when people talk about f-droid they really mean the main repository, not the extra hoops to add less trusted third parties.
Also the way they publish it it doesn't have the reproducible build features of F-Droid
sad, I didn't realise that because their website has an "install from f-droid" link. it does reinforce my point that android is a proper platform with a viable distribution mechanism though, if they can self host a third party repository.
true... there are many better reasons to leave iOS than for a keyboard
I assume it would be feasible for someone else to write an iOS keyboard relying on this model?
Where did they say they were boycotting iOS?
boycotting?
Finally! Usable! Between this and the excellent dictation, it's finally looking good enough that I can probably recommend it to anyone.
Very nice. FUTO is the keyboard I keep recommending. The only thing missing now would be a decent dual-swipe support. Injecting single letters with taps during a swipe or continuing a swipe with another finger makes it even faster since it let's you avoid awkward long horizontal "detours" just to hit one letter.
Have you used heliboard's two finger swiping? Can't live without two finger swipe
I started using the main FUTO keyboard after seeing it mentioned here the other week. Then a few days later I tried to open my HSBC banking app and it refused to open because it detected FUTO keyboard which it treated as an insecure application, so had to remove FUTO after a couple of days of use.
If this can learn my patterns, that itself is enough. Google Keyboard used to do this, but mysteriously doesn't do it anymore.
Would love an iOS version! The keyboard landscape on iOS is grim, and gboard hasn't received updates in years.
On the one hand snapping to the nearest English word is useful. On the other hand it will prevent our language from evolving.
I can't speak for this keyboard, but at least on Gboard, if you type out a word a few times, it'll be stored in its suggestions dictionary and you'll be able to swipe type it.
This is great! As someone with one thumb that can't bend at either joint and another that doesn't bend well I've been a single finger typer on my phone. Thanks to all involved for this privacy respecting swipe keyboard!
Absolutely cool demo. I used to love this feature in SwiftKey. It still works but after their acquisition by Microsoft they've gone downhill. I've since switched to iOS but would love to try Futo out when it's available for iOS
Can it do two finger swipe like Heliboard? Must have feature for modern swipe keyboard
The swipe demo on the website is neat! I wasn't expecting to be able to use it with my mouse.
Sounds good but the big problem I have with futo key board is that it can only do one language at a time. With gboard I can swipe type al 3 languages I speak without having to constantly switch. I wish they could make that.
I'm sure they will, version 3. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Well neither is perfect. But I really need that multilingual typing. Constantly switching is so annoying. I won't use the FUTO one until it can do that. It's not some minor nice-to-have.
Gboard has obvious imperfections like data mining. Though on my phone I can just block its network access altogether which mitigates it a lot.
Lots to be desired, unfortunately. I tried 3 different words. It nailed the first 2 but the third was impossible: The word "serverside" is impossible to swipe. I tried 10x, never did it even come close.
I don't think server side is in their dict without a dash. I don't know how to type dashed words in swipe. SwiftKey cant do it either. Long words usually work very well though. That's most of what I use swipe for. Short words I tap, long words I swipe.
e.g.,
Broadside Surfside integration financially illiterate calibration fantastical proliferation haphazardly horrifically striations proliferation (all typed first or second try except antidisestablishmentarianism which admittedly I got carried away)
Interesting, I just tried it and it got server-side the first try, although it wants to insert a hyphen. I did download the larger dictionary from their site.
Looking at the example videos, specially the VR one, I can't help but think that this gives every word its own unique shape. For example, the word "model" got shape matching infinity symbol.
The first two words i tried to type were both "hello" and I got "help" and "hell" as first suggestions. I'm not sure if the web app is using the same algo but that's an immediate ick.
Is there some sort of swipe data standard? If there were, it feels like getting a few proper OSS projects going might start to shift things in the right direction (assuming they cracked a way to share a bit of anonymized data)
Swiping feels a bit more accurate than Gboard overall. I'm not seeing a way to add a word to the dictionary. Am I missing something?
The demo at least doesn't support tapping, which makes it a nope for me, even if the swiping experience hadn't been ~hank~ ~help~ hello world.
Try the keyboard or the training. It's better than GBoard in some ways.
I'm curious how it compares with Microsoft SwiftKey. Obviously, that's not an open-source app, but it would be an interesting benchmark.
I've been using SwiftKey for 10 years (typing not swiping), and test ran FUTO for the last month.
FUTO improved a lot (I had tried it a year earlier also) but SwiftKey's suggestions are still a lot better in my opinion. With SwiftKey I can just type roughly in the right spot without looking and the correct words will come out most of the time. FUTO still suggests a lot of nonsensical next words that just do not follow after the previous in English.
I hope it improves further so I can switch.
The voice models are great though, and they can be used as part of the keyboard or standalone.
I'm also a heavy SwiftKey user, but donated some money to futo last year in hopes they improve the keyboard.
SwiftKey got annoying with pushing Ai image Gen and sometimes pop-ups.
Combine this with AI, and you only have to ramble a bit on your keyboard to get the collected works of Shakespeare.
I used to use SwiftKey, but Microsoft acquired and ruined it years ago. It worked really well. Since then the only one that worked for me is Gboard.
I've had this installed for a while but found the swiping too inaccurate. I'm trying it again now and I reckon it's as good as Gboard now. I've written this comment using it. Nice!
Edit: I've noticed that, like Gboard, it's still hard to type words like "fuck" or even "tits" etc. Are these words just missing from the dictionary? It's always felt like I'm not allowed to type them because I'm not a big boy. I don't type those particular words much, as it happens, but other missing words is annoying.
Apple’s swipe to text is so good that I forget there’s still work to be done in the space. Great stuff FUTO.
Gboard has been messing with the emoji search recently. It is worse.
Previously, if you type "fac" or "face" or "facep" or "facepa" or "palm" in the search box, you'd get the facepalm emoji among the results. Inexplicably, now the lying emoji, bacon, fondue are shown when you type "fac" but not the classic facepalm. It is only after you type "facepal" that the facepalm emoji appears in the results, which is a major... facepalm for the Gboard team.
As a parent, I need to _constantly_ send the facepalm emoji to my partner, so I noticed immediately when it recently changed. I think they're now trying to account for multiple languages, misspellings, a larger list of synonyms that allows partial matches, sentiment/meaning/synonyms, etc. In any case, I've always felt like emojis should be weighted by overall usage patterns (I have never used the fondue emoji and don't know anyone who does) and now they need a better search trie, where the facepalm emoji is in the top results of "fac".
At least the web demo doesn't work right if you swipe with multiple fingers at the same time.
> Your keyboard shouldn't connect to the internet.
Amen. Glad to see that companies like that still exist.
Awesome project!! I will migrate off from gboard when support for Norwegian gets better.
Does anyone know of a FOSS keyboard that supports swiping in Korean? I'm yet to find one
Oh frabjous day! I've waited YEARS for something like this. THANK YOU FUTO!
what languages it support? They only mention "language-agnostic".
I don't really get swiping. It's always going to be quicker and more efficient to type because you can use both hands, right? And you don't have to swipe your finger across the screen?
Still going strong with Fleksy even though you can't even download it anymore.
Sometimes you have one hand full. When my kids were small, especially, I REALLY benefited from swipe typing. I still often use it when I am holding something in one hand.
Maybe for you personally, but in a general sense I don't see how you can hold a phone and "use both hands" to type individual keys.
One notable advantage of swiping is that you can be quite loose with each single swipe gesture whereas you have to hit the right key many times for each word. That swipe is also usually much quicker than finding multiple keys for most people.
You preferences may reflect youth, eyesight, finger size, co-ordination, phone case usage or other advantages most people don't have.
I think it more likely reflects using bigger phones, where swiping across a while keyboard is quite slow, but also, I hate typing with two hands with any other app than Fleksy. You just have to hit within the general area of the key and it counts. I haven't had that kind of success with any other keyboard I've tried.
It traces back to accessibility. Think of folks with shaky hands. The screen helps to stabilize the tremors. A similar thing applies to typing on a bumpy bus or while walking.
That said, it also depends on screen size. Back when Swype first became popular, Android screen sizes ranged from 3-5". That was another factor driving it's popularity back in the day.
Definitely not for everyone or in every situation though
Swiping with one finger is faster than typing with two in my experience. But you can have best of both worlds, my keyboard let's me swipe with two fingers at the same time (heliboard on f-droid)
The thing is, with Fleksy, as long as you get within a few characters of the letter, it counts, and you also switch auto-correct choices by swiping up or swiping down, so you can fix them easily. It's a joy to type with 2 hands, honestly.
If you have long nails then two thumbs on a tiny phone keyboard are pretty much impossible.
This is building on quick sand, a truly new model would not use the same dumb old grid that's neither fit for hands nor for fingers. But kudos for the openness!
FUTO is terrible!
I run GOS and have tried it, you spend more time deleting works than actually using it.
I was forced to install Google GBoard instead and revoke its network access. Gboard swipe typing works flawlessly, FUTO still an Alpha project.
Seems like this is a new swipe model, though, so it should be more comparable. I also had to switch back to GBoard on GrapheneOS since I was spending more time fixing typos than actually typing with FUTO but I'm willing to give it another shot.
> Gboard swipe typing works flawlessly, FUTO still an Alpha project
I agree. I find that swipe typing on Gboard feels much better than FUTO's because I think it adapts to my typing style. I tried FUTO about six months ago, and it was a bit frustrating so I switched back to Gboard. Hopefully, it has improved since then, but I haven't checked.
> Hopefully, it has improved since then, but I haven't checked.
Good news then because you're currently in a thread about how FUTO has improved!
Just because they say so doesn't necessarily make it true, which is why I included the "hopefully" and "haven't checked".
The early iterations of swipe were very inaccurate, yes. But the newest swipe release mentioned here is much more mature.
It's not perfect, but it's practically on par with GBoard aside from a few blips here and there. It's enough for me to get rid of GBoard for good, and not consider reinstalling it.
seems to be really good
I've been using it for a while. The insistence of keyboards on having a large bar of autocorrect suggestions taking valuable vertical space annoys me to no end.
I really liked using Fleksy which let you swipe up and down on the keyboard to change autocorrect results, including adding words to your dictionary. I'm still not sure if FUTO even has that option.
demo seems worse than heliboard
I've used both extensively and it's a fair bit better, but was significantly worse preupdate
Can we please get this for iPhone? Their keyboard is extremely imprecise, I have to go back and correct each sentence.
I used the FUTO keyboard for a few months but ditched it as the word suggestions were either odd or random (one example: I'd write 'Jordan' and it would always suggest 'Peterson' as the next word), and I'd got a weirdly passive aggressive prompt saying I should really purchase a license. Went back to the de-Googled Android keyboard in GrapheneOS
Following "Jordan" with "Peterson" doesn't seem random in the slightest
It never had my own surname as a suggestion, and there's many people, places and things called 'Jordan' in some way
So you want it to randomly pick the next word, rather than suggest the most common word?
The most common word I entered after my forename is my surname. All other keyboards handled this fine, but FUTO didn't. That's what's odd
I think that, for it to learn a word, you need to actually press the middle suggestion, not just space. I'm not sure, though. Couldn't you add your surname as a custom word?
Just tried typing Jordan on mine, and my suggestions were "on", "is", and the Jordanian flag. So I'm pretty sure you had to have typed the words "Jordan Peterson" before for it to make that association.
The donation prompt can permanently disabled with two taps, so I'm not sure why that'd be a reason to abandon it. It's a complete non-issue.
"You've been using FUTO keyboard for X days. If you find this app useful, please consider paying to support future development.
FUTO is dedicated to making good software that doesn't abuse you. This app will never serve ads or collect your personal data."
I don't mean to be rude here, but this is an extremely bland, mild message. There's nothing passive aggressive about it in any way. What do you find aggressive about this?
I wrote Hola in spanish and got holocaust
[dead]
If you'd prefer a swipe typing library under a truly open license, NLnet is funding [1] the creation of one by the HeliBoard [2] devs.
HeliBoard currently uses a proprietary library extracted from GBoard, which you need to add manually (since the app has no Internet connectivity out of principle), but they're asking for swipe data contributions, to be then distributed under CC-BY-SA 4.0, which'll be then utilized by their own open swipe library.
Check our more details here [3], [4] if you'd like to contribute.
[1] https://nlnet.nl/project/GestureTyping/
[2] https://github.com/HeliBorg/HeliBoard
[3] https://github.com/HeliBorg/HeliBoard/wiki/Tutorial:-How-to-...
[4] https://youtu.be/CyjumVTWtJA
I have contributed to this. Heliboard also great because it supports two finger swipe which is huge ergonomic improvement