I gotta say I went from Heliboard to FUTO Keyboard, didn’t regret it.
Love the voice typing, Glide typing I should utilize more honestly but I think it isn’t perfect.
Most importantly, it’s got the Japanese layout which was a need for me that heliboard still lacks. Though I’ve yet to get used to it quite a bit, not because idk how to write or anything but without any labeling you’re playing with muscle memory and I hope they fix it. (At least Japanese voice typing is real decent, and as someone who doesn’t know the Kanjis, this is the perfect combination)
Spoken like someone who never gave FUTO Keyboard a try or another try. It’s auto correct is also decent. FUTO also uses a Transformer LM for text prediction and with auto correction it should be as good if not better than GBoard.
And trust me I was using Gboard with Network cut too but as I started fresh on my Graphene, my owner profile’s rule now is it should not have Sandboxed Google Play, all degoogled while those that need it are living in another user.
Basically then it is what I said with above.
Also keyboards like it, heliboard, florisboard and more are vital for non-GrapheneOS (either because there are damning reasons to be stuck in stock or cannot afford a pixel).
I’ve just switched back from FUTO to GBoard after trying it out for the last month.
Both FUTO and GBoard use local ML inference to auto-correct words based on some fine tuned models. I do think FUTO auto-correct is pretty good, much better than the other FOSS keyboards that I’ve tried. From a technological standpoint they’re pretty tight.
I see that FUTO uses a fine tuned version of Meta’s open sourced LLaMA model to run on device which is indeed pretty great for this type of task. The unsolvable problem for FUTO and other FOSS keyboards is that they could never match the quantity of training data to better fine tune their models well enough to compete with the trillion dollar conglomerates like Google or M$ that have been gathering data from their keyboards for many years now.
GBoard has over 10B+ downloads on the Play store and will train on anyone’s keyboard usage data as long as they have the network enabled. That’s an absurd amount of data for ML fine tuning.
I do wish FUTO the best, but as a user, I want my keyboard auto-correct to work flawlessly. Given that there are no privacy concerns for me to just use GBoard with network turned off + no Google Play services, I see no reason to settle for an inferior product which in this case is unfortunately any other FOSS keyboard.
I remove its Network permission. Sure, it could then potentially IPC to do some shady shit, but not if I don’t have the Google Play services removed already (which I do).
Personally I can’t help but be a bit paranoid here. Could Gboard interact with Google code in another app and transmit data? (So many apps have Google ad code, Firebase services, analytics, etc). Might Google implement a sneaky method in the future that opens another pathway for data upload in Android? I would hope Graphene team would catch and mitigate that. What if you accidentally enabled network permission briefly? It would only take a moment and then all that data is in the cloud (that might be every message you’ve typed, every password you’ve typed or copied, usage metadata, etc. Unless you’ve been clearing app data). Someone correct me if my thinking is completely wrong.
Again, that’s my paranoid take. I do think disabled network permission + no Google Play services would be fine.
Also agreed about FUTO having better autocorrect than the FOSS options, but still noticeably worse than Gboard/Swiftkey.
Been thinking about this way of doing it. I suppose it can work too. I just tried it and yes, I have to begrudgingly admit it works so much better.
I’m torn between using and supporting a FOSS tool or using what I need to without regard for the principles for which I like the alternative stands (which also does provide a decent experience and not bad by any measure).
Exactly. This is the choice of morality that we keep running into again and again, and arguing in this community.
I already stopped caring about supporting things based on morality alone. This is why I bought a Pixel to run GOS even though Google is evil. I just want high functioning, secure and private system/software. Everything else is secondary to me.
Yes, as always technically you’re right. But you also gotta explain how come. Simply commenting the truth without reason always leaves the reader with more questions than the thread answers.
I get why but I am saying this on behalf of others who may not. You have the right answers but are almost always incomplete, from what I have seen/can tell.
What is there to explain? It’s not free and open source software, it doesn’t using a FOSS license. The only reason people are confused is because FUTO lied about being FOSS.