The successor of Openboard, Heliboard finally comes out in 1.0 my favorite open source keyboard out there.
HeliBoard with Swipe + FUTO have made replacing gboard possible for me. I feel like it’s been a 90% replacement, a far greater degree than some of the decent keyboards currently available. I regularly use but swipe and speech to text in two languages. I’m really really happy and grateful for these tools. 💜
Just in case I’m asked, here’s the basics steps to get it going:
- I downloaded the release from https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard and then installed. (Or set it up via Obtainium until its ready for F-Droid release)
- I downloaded the Swipe library linked on the HeliBoard Github page from here.
- Under HeliBoard settings -> advanced, I clicked “load gesture library” and selected the downloaded swipe library
- And for voice input, l downloaded Futo from the play store. FYI, it’s free and offline, but not FOSS.
That’s it.
Just setup the two apps with your specifics like the theme and etc. This is what mine looks like now:
How do you get your microphone option in the top right corner like that. Mine only shows up under the toolbar menu, after hitting the arrow key (top left corner)
You can tap and hold on the microphone button to pin it to the right.
This is a hot tip!
Exactly this. You can pin several functions this way.
Wow, that’s a gamechanger! HeliBoard has so many neat little tricks like that, but sometimes they’re hard to find.
Here’s another one then: in heliboard settings, go to about, and hit “Description of hidden features.” It’s where I found that, plus a few more neat tricks!
Thanks! 😁
This was very helpful, thank you.
Edit: is the FUTO app restricted in any way until I purchase premium?
Not that I’m aware of.
until its ready for F-Droid release
Just FYI, it is on IzzyOnDroid!
this is great. I’ve been looking for a gboard replacement for so long
minor thing: how do i import my personal dictionary from gboard? the github page says something about .dict files but gboard exported a zip with a .txt fileUnfortunately, I’m not familiar with importing and exporting personal dictionaries. I looked into it a bit, but wasn’t successful in finding anything relevant.
Really wish you could speak punctuation with FUTO.
Oh my goodness yes! I say punctuations constantly out of habit and then have to edit them out. But I’m also really impressed with FUTOs ability to determine punctuation based on pauses.
Yes, don’t get me wrong, it is very, very, good. However I want full control over the characters being entered. I had thought that’s what “verbose” mode was going to be, but honestly I can’t figure out what that is.
Am I understanding correctly, you can swipe in two languages without hitting a “switch language” button like on Gboard? If so I may have to make the switch
Unfortunately no. That’s remains part of the 10% that this solution doesn’t replicate 1:1. But… you can use a spacebar gesture (e.g. vertical swipe) to quickly change languages. Works like a charm.
Hi! Started using heliboard a few weeks ago, but what are those other two?
HeliBoard board supports Swipe gestures and FUTO is a free, offline speech to text app that works incredibly well for me and the two languages I use.
Links and instructions here: https://lemmy.ca/comment/8335355
Thanks! Hadn’t found how to use swipe and thought it wasn’t supported Don’t use speech to text, but i was missing swiping
This is the definitive replacement for gboard, people. It works fantastically well already with everything that Gboard has and it will only get better from here on.
Does it have multiple layouts support (Latin, Cyrillic), swipe typing and clipboard history?
Idk about layouts but swipe is available if you look into it, you just need to download a file to load the it into the keyboard and yes on clipboard history
Thanks, I’ll look into it.
Great piece of software!
I second this
It’s really great to see a continuation of Openboard.
Still waiting for Japanese support. At the moment the only decent Japanese keyboard on Android are either GBoard or Microsoft one unfortunately.
Have you tried fcitx with the Anthy plugin? I use that for Japanese.
Thank you for bringing up the app to me!
I started learning Japanese as I started using Heliboard, for now I just swap back when I need it. GBoard doesn’t play nice with the language button switching between apps so I just use the OS keyboard button and have the language button disabled everywhere, which also frees up some space!
This update somehow has broken haptic feedback on my keyboard 🤔
Thanks, not sure how I missed this!
Why do they always tell you it’s the successor of whatever, but never what it is for?
Read the whole sentence?
Why do I have to read a hole?
It was late…
TLDR: Why do I stop using OpenBoard and use this instead :)?
Openboard hasn’t updated in a year and a half
But how often do I need to update my keyboard lol?
If you’re satisfied with it, you don’t need to update. But Openboard lacks a lot of features many people want. The biggest of them is probably the glide typing, which Heliboard supports. And it also added a lot of quality of life improvements.
Some new features, bug fixes, and ongoing support.
It is a new application so you do have to set it up fresh - don’t switch until you have a bit of spare time.Missed the back and restore button in settings.Personally I’m on one of the fork’s beta versions. I’m waiting for the f-droid release so I get updates.
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Found it. Thanks
Use Obtainium? I get updates from GitHub (and Fdroid) that way.
It has swipe typing plus a lot of other new features/theme customisation that openboard didn’t have.
Swiping
Looks nice but I wish the clipboard history could be based on number of items and not just time.
I’m sure that could be implemented.
Is this better in any way tohan florisboard? I’ve been using it (florisboard) for a year now and had no problems and have loved its features (especially the text navigation arrows and clipboard history).
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But now the key vibration is dead
Ahh So i am not the only one. hope it gets fixed soon.
yeah for me too. hopefully it will be fixed soon.
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a new update has been released a few hours ago and it’s been fixed
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Been looking for a decent keyboard app, gonna try this out for sure 🙂
Been using this for about 3 months or so. The one piece missing is good swipe word recognition - its really poor compared to Gboard even after this amount of time. I spend more time correcting words than I saved nor typing them. Used swipe with Gboard for many years previously so I know hope swipe works.
Any suggestions on how to improve it?
I have found this to be the case as well.
What it has forced me to do now is to actually try to be close to the letters. When I’m swiping with gboard, I was very sloppy and it would recognize what I wrote. At this point, I’m fine being more accurate for the tradeoff.
Hmmm. Yeah I’m pretty sloppy about my letters too. Maybe I need to be a bit more precise to get the best out of it.
I have to admit that gboard is pretty amazing at the detecting my sloppiness. But… knowing everything I type and say is going to Google… well, let’s just says I’m willing to tolerate the extra work so as to keep things away from them.
FUTO is definitely slower than Google’s speech to text engine, but for the same reason… I think I’m completely okay with that now.
I’ve turned off network access for Gboard and have the offline speech recognition installed. This is why I have Helioboard + FUTO installed but don’t use them, as they don’t yet exceed an offline Gboard in function.
Dang. I use TrackerControl to do just that for many apps and hadn’t even thought about trying to do it for gboard + gvoice because I had not know they had offline processing available for both.
Now its tempting to switch back and see… 😬 but… so far this combo of HeliBoard with swipe and FUTO have been sooo close… and its not google. 😏
In Gboard settings, under voice typing, it is the faster voice typing toggle. That brings the voice recognition library onto your device rather than using data. The only thing that does not work in Gboard after disabling network access is the gif search.
I extensively use glide typing when not using voice, and as you’ll see from other comments on this post the glide typing is not so great on Helioboard.
And… I do kind of prefer Gboard’s style of voice to text where I voice all of the punctuation. Pausing and thinking about what you are going to say using FUTO means it tends to end a sentence.
Yeah, I’m having to tolerate a whole bunch for this next best solution, but it’s far from perfect.
It seems you and I have near identical usage style and when the same pet peeve, so I completely understand why you use it the way you do. I’m quite terrible and very very slow at typing normally. When I watch my kids text, it literally boggles my mind. It simply is impossible for me.
Any idea when it’s going to be available in fdroid?
It’s on IzzyOnDroid repo
Thanks!
Clarifying: the app is there but not this latest update yet. It’ll have some delay. You can use obtanium if you don’t want to wait
Thanks, it doesn’t really matter, as long as it gets there eventually. I just don’t want to have to check for updates manually. Thanks again. I really appreciate it!
Just checked and it’s already updated there.
Yeah, I just got the update. Thanks buddy!
Finally had a reason to try Obtanium. Picked it right up. Hopeful this can replace the watch I set in GitHub.
Thanks!
Did the same thing, but now I can see it was updated today in Izzy
Same, and my wasn’t that painless :)
Does not use internet permission, and thus is 100% offline.
Does the AOSP keyboard access internet?
