- https://gitlab.futo.org/keyboard/swipe-library/-/blob/master...
- https://github.com/futo-org/android-keyboard/blob/master/LIC...
https://huggingface.co/futo-org/futo-swipe/blob/main/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.
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
It's just a commercial license with very mild terms.
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.
So no, the license doesn't matter.
Every year, I try the stock iOS keyboard, but then I always go back.
Boy did I hate when a "secure" input came up and I was forced to use the default keyboard.
Wrt the “occasional bug”, what happens is that sometimes (enough to make it bad) the keyboard doesn’t render at all!
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...
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%.
https://github.com/futo-org/futo-keyboard-layouts/issues/163
90-95% is an 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.
Edit: apparently there's a modern successor? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=inc.flide.vi8
* 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. (-:
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.
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.
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.
I'd also be very interested in SwiftKey alternatives, since MS already almost killed it once.
I am interested in something that has support for multiple languages + swipe support.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Still going strong with Fleksy even though you can't even download it anymore.
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
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.
Unfortunately some of those Swype nicities are patented [1], so other keyboards can't use 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
What's the problem of Icelandic? Is it because you stick words together like in Danish or German?
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.
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.
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)
Gboard has obvious imperfections like data mining. Though on my phone I can just block its network access altogether which mitigates it a lot.
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.
SwiftKey got annoying with pushing Ai image Gen and sometimes pop-ups.
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-...
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).
Integrated speak to text, good autocorrect typing, good autocorrect swiping.
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.
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"
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.
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".
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.
Amen. Glad to see that companies like that still exist.
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 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'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.
