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!
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! 😁
Exactly this. You can pin several functions this way.
until its ready for F-Droid release
Just FYI, it is on IzzyOnDroid!
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.
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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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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!
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.
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.
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 can’t tell me what it is or how it’s useful to me when I scan through the primary landing page, not worth my time.
HeliBoard is a privacy-conscious and customizable open-source keyboard, based on AOSP / OpenBoard. Does not use internet permission, and thus is 100% offline.
First Paragraph of the readme.md in that repository.
