Over the years I’ve tested out pretty much all the Android keyboards, but swipe typing always kept me on GBoard, even though GBoard did not support voice typing for anything except Google, so I had to switch keyboards for that.

Recently I learned that HeliBoard has support for gesture typing with the Google library. But I couldn’t find any instructions on where to get the necessary files or how to do it. Well, someone posted a link to the file elsewhere so I’ll share it here. And it works! Extremely well. I can also pin a button for voice typing and then select Transcribro for that (which uses OpenAI Whisper locally and works super well.

Another gripe I had with GBoard was the cursor moves way too fast when swiping on the space bar. Not so with Heliboard. You can also swipe backwards from the backspace key and it will highlight text and then delete it when you let go.

  • sbird@sopuli.xyz
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    1 day ago

    I believe Heliboard has the option for installing multiple keyboard languages, and you can switch between them by holding down the spacebar. No idea how well the spellcheck works in Spanish though. For me, using the Portuguese keyboard seems to work well, and spellcheck looks okay. Note that I have only had a few lessons in Portuguese and haven’t touched it since so I only know counting to ten and a couple other things, so I haven’t used it for a long period to fully judge how well it works.

    Olá, um dóis três quatro cinco seis sete oito nove dez