Not OP, but consider using FUTO Keyboard. It’s made by the group Louis Rossmann works with, and it has offline speech to text (no sending data to Google), swipe keyboard, and completions. It’s also source-available, which isn’t as good as open source, but you could examine the code and verify their claims if you wanted to.
I’m using it and, while it’s not perfect, it’s way better than the open source Android keyboards with swiping that I’ve tried.
Thanks, will try it out! I need an emoji picker though. Does it have that?
Edit: typing with it now. It had an emoji picker. 👍
- I like the picker’s grouping, actually. Body parts (hands) are closer to faces.
- The recent emoji section doesn’t work.
- It doesn’t have the latest emoji set, as far as I can tell.
- The swiping is much more sensitive than Gboard. I’m not a fan as of yet. Maybe it’s still learning. Seems like it can’t handle the speed as well as Gboard can.
- Prediction suggestions are terrible so far.
- I don’t like that swipe delete doesn’t delete whole words.
All in all, I don’t think I can recommend it in its current state.
But, if you type by pressing buttons, the predictions are actually pretty good. Maybe that saves a bit of time if you’re very stationary and not on the move.
Yeah, it’s very much alpha software, but it works surprisingly well for being in such an early state. I’m using it as my keyboard now, and it works well enough, but certainly not perfect.
Then again, I’m willing to deal with a lot of nonsense to avoid Google, so YMMV.
I hear the speech to text is pretty good. I haven’t tried it (I hate dictation), but maybe you could give it a whirl before you give up on it, it’s supposed to be its killer feature.
