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Posted by futohq 2 days ago

FUTO Swipe – A new swipe typing model(swipe.futo.tech)
701 points | 249 commentspage 2
vulkoingim 1 day ago|
That's neat! Would love to try it, but am also on iOS :/

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.

puttycat 1 day ago|
What do you mean? iOS has a native swift option.
cloogshicer 1 day ago|||
Native iOS is significantly worse than SwiftKey and doesn't support multiple languages without having to switch the keyboard constantly. In SwiftKey you can mix languages.

I'd also be very interested in SwiftKey alternatives, since MS already almost killed it once.

puttycat 1 day ago||
I have two languages defined in iOS (English and French) and the native swift keyboard recognizes which language I'm swifting in.
vulkoingim 1 day ago|||
Pretty much what `cloogshicer` said.

I am interested in something that has support for multiple languages + swipe support.

puttycat 1 day ago||
iOS has that.
vulkoingim 1 day ago||
Mate...it does not, it's not like I haven't tried. Try to set Bulgarian keyboard on the native iOS and let me know exactly what you see.

https://www.apple.com/uk/ios/feature-availability/#quicktype...

puttycat 1 day ago||
I have two languages defined in iOS (English and French) and the native swift keyboard recognizes which language I'm swifting in.

Maybe this is supported only for specific language combinations.

vulkoingim 21 hours ago||
It is indeed supported only for some languages - you can check the link for which ones. And it's not only about recognising multiple languages, but actual functionality that it's missing. It doesn't have a Bulgarian dictionary and support for swipe in BG, which is what I need...
tgtweak 1 day ago||
swype was so good before it got destroyed by Nuance. Gboard's own swipe to type is decent but missing a lot of those features that made swype so much better (swipe once backwards to erase the previous word, loop a letter to double it, swipe up to the suggested word to select it, correct a previous word with the next few words context...)
arusahni 1 day ago|
It requires more precision than Swype, but GBoard supports multi-word word deletion if you swipe back originating from the backspace key. You get some haptic feedback, and can scrub to adjust the selected boundary.

Unfortunately some of those Swype nicities are patented [1], so other keyboards can't use them.

[1]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7098896B2/en

tgtweak 1 day ago||
I feel like a clean room opensource keyboard could implement those without any patent liabilities. Software patents are notoriously difficult to enforce and I don't think nuance is spending any money enforcing this given they stopped swype in 2018.
arusahni 15 hours ago||
They're now owned by infamously-litigious Microsoft.
sholladay 1 day ago||
This keyboard seems to ship with a dictionary that includes a lot of curse words. No more ducking around.
a022311 1 day ago||
I can't see what's wrong with that (you choose whether to accept suggestions or not), but you can always blacklist predictions by long-pressing on them.
ta8903 1 day ago||
What dictionary are you using? I installed the app on android and am not able to type "fuck", neither with the inbuilt dictionary nor from an imported English (UK) dictionary from their site. Even typing it manually doesn't seem to add it to the dictionary, which makes it really annoying to use.
Sebguer 2 days ago||
Great timing given I just installed SwiftKey since Microsoft has started embedding ads and dark pattern redirects to Bing!
speedgoose 2 days ago||
You meant uninstalled, right ?

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.

skeledrew 2 days ago|||
Has to be. I jumped from SwiftKey the moment I heard Microsoft bought it, back in '14 IIRC.
Sebguer 1 day ago|||
Hahaha, yes. Though now I'm imagining an incredible alternative world where I only install the most enshittified pieces of software.
ericol 2 days ago||
Assuming you mean uninstall, yeah I did the same because of that.

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.

tmach32 1 day ago||
For us sad iOS people, what's your favorite swiping keyboard? I just use the stock Apple one because custom keyboards can still be a little buggy (eg not loading occasionally).
kilroy123 1 day ago||
I still use Gboard. It's pretty old now and hasn't been updated in a long time, but it still works.

Every year, I try the stock iOS keyboard, but then I always go back.

projektfu 1 day ago|||
I found GBoard crashed often but was very good and had the wonderful built-in calculator, not available on Android anymore. Still the case?

Boy did I hate when a "secure" input came up and I was forced to use the default keyboard.

Squarex 1 day ago|||
For a long time apple keyboard did not support my language (czech), I would use gboard. And yes, it is still slightly better than the Apple one, but the switching is buggy and the problem is on the apple side.
tmach32 1 day ago||
They didn’t support Czech?! Until what year?
Squarex 1 day ago||
I am not quite sure, like 2-4 years ago.
eviks 1 day ago||
Occasional bug is worse than permanent suffering?
tmach32 1 day ago||
Well, iOS swipe keyboard is not that bad. I would not call it “permanent suffering”. I tried gboard and swiftkey and they aren’t a giant improvement over the stock keyboard these days. They used to be.

Wrt the “occasional bug”, what happens is that sometimes (enough to make it bad) the keyboard doesn’t render at all!

eviks 1 day ago||
What happens is you simply toggle the keyboard field off /on in th the same or a different app, a simple albeit slightly annoying fix.

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...

arnorhs 1 day ago||
I'm curious to see how it deals with dual languages - ie. not switching between them, but using two languages in the same sentence like the google keyboard supports out of the box.

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.

reddalo 1 day ago||
> because of the way the language works

What's the problem of Icelandic? Is it because you stick words together like in Danish or German?

jonasced 1 day ago||
They have a multilingual input mode that also works with swipe input! I've tried it briefly with Swedish/English on a Swedish keyboard and it switched between languages in the same sentence in a way that made sense to me, but I had to download a separate dictionary.
gblargg 2 days ago||
Voice dictation is so much better than GBoard, which I've been using until now. It capitalizes and punctuates sentences without me needing to, and got several sentences perfect without any post-editing needed, and it's all a local model. The one downside is no real-time update, just batch conversion once you're done talking. Looks like they've fixed the swipe backspace and spacebar to not be over-sensitive like it was a year or two ago when I last tried (and allowed some customization).
projektfu 1 day ago||
It has gotten very good but my brain is much worse at producing intelligible speech than it is at writing. I end up having to edit a lot anyway, which is hard with voice.
killerstorm 1 day ago|||
I'm actually surprised with how bad is Google's voice recognition - with all their immense compute resources, R&D, owning Android, etc, what prevents them from having SotA voice recognition?.. Even "it's not a priority" argument doesn't work as they are pushing Gemini assistant. (ChatGPT app works so much better.)
johanyc 1 day ago||
gboard has voice dictation and it has real-time update
gblargg 22 hours ago||
Yep, and it's pretty bad. The only benefit is real-time, which is why I highlighted that FUTO lacks that. If it made as many errors as GBoard, it wouldn't be worth using.
sheept 2 days ago||
It would be nice if there was a swipe typing keyboard that was similar to Chinese/Japanese IMEs where you can swipe out a full phrase and the keyboard can use it to fix short/ambiguous words based on context. Today, when I'm swipe typing sloppily, it can be hard to distinguish between pairs like on/in, of/if/I'd, it's/its, etc
artisin 1 day ago||
FUTO has gone from tolerable to pretty great over the past year-ish. Sure, the (english) auto-completion still may not be the "best," but I generally find it better than my iPad auto-completion. Thou, my fav-features are pretty simple: the ability to pin dedicated action buttons like undo/redo/select-all, and direct control over my clipboard history. The clipboard does come with hard max limits of 100 items and 336 hours, but since FUTO is open-source, all one has to do is clone, patch, compile, and voila, unlimited clipboard history! And they say dreams don't come true.
julianlam 2 days ago|
As a FUTO keyboard user for about a year I'm quite excited for this!

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"

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