what it does today
The keyboard you already know, with the parts that usually live in someone’s cloud rebuilt to stay on your phone. It is a beta: good enough for daily use if you don’t mind reporting the odd bug.
side a — today
- a1
multilingual swipe
Swipe in several languages in the same sentence without touching a language key. Today that means Czech, Slovak and English; Spanish and German are next. FUTO Swipe reads the gesture; our decoder adds the accents and lets the previous word choose between candidates.
- a2
the next word, predicted on the phone
A small neural network guesses your next word from what you have written so far. It runs on the phone; there is no server to send anything to.
- a3
dictation without leaving the keyboard
Tap the mic at the end of the suggestion strip and talk. The keyboard records the audio itself, from the phone or a Bluetooth headset, LE Audio buds or hearing aids, and Offline Speech to Text turns it into text on the device. Long dictation keeps going past the one-minute mark.
- a4
feels like Gboard
Material You colours, the same long-press characters, the word you typed in the middle of the strip, a number row in password fields, and no silent autocorrection.
- a5
emoji by any part of a word
Type “ocket” in emoji search and the rocket shows up. A matching emoji also appears in the strip while you write.
- a6
the space bar as a trackpad
Hold the space bar and slide to move the cursor, or set it to switch languages instead.
- a7
HeliBoard underneath
Clipboard history, one-handed and split layouts, themes, custom layouts and physical keyboards all come from HeliBoard.
side b — coming
- b1
Spanish and German, with their own swipe dictionaries and predictions
- b2
A “fix sentence” button backed by a small model on the phone
nothing leaves your phone
Droneboard can’t reach the internet because Android never gave it permission to.
- No
INTERNETpermission, no analytics, no crash reports. - It downloads nothing. Extra dictionaries are imported from a file.
- Dictation audio goes to Offline Speech to Text on the same phone and nowhere else.
- Contacts in suggestions are optional and off by default.
Check it yourself: Settings → Apps → Droneboard → Permissions. Network access isn’t on the list.
how good is the swipe
| test | top-1 | top-3 |
|---|---|---|
| Czech gesture set, Google’s gesture library (as in HeliBoard) | 82.4 | 96.3 |
| Czech gesture set, Droneboard with its own Czech dictionary | 78.2 | 92.0 |
| A real phone, 106 prompted Slovak and English words | 82.1 | 92.5 |
install
Zapstore is the easiest way: signed releases and updates from one app, no account.
- Install Zapstore from zapstore.dev.
- Open Droneboard on Zapstore and install it.
- Open Droneboard and follow the prompts to switch it on.
- For dictation, also install Offline Speech to Text.
Build it yourself from the source code. GPL-3.0.
news on nostr
Droneboard posts on nostr, an open network that no company owns. Your browser loads the newest posts straight from the relays; this page has no server of its own and sets no cookies.
- Profile on njump.me
- droneboard@cypherpunk.today
- Zaps: droneboard@pay.cypherpunk.today
credits
- keyboard
- A fork of HeliBoard, which builds on OpenBoard and AOSP LatinIME. GPL-3.0; some files Apache-2.0 or CC-BY-SA-4.0.
- swipe
- Swipe typing powered by FUTO Swipe (swipe-library, GPL-3.0). The model weights are under the FUTO Model Weights License.
- headset recording
- Bluetooth and LE Audio recording comes from Third Ear by the same author.
- dictation
- Offline Speech to Text, installed separately.
- word lists
- FineWeb-2 (ODC-By), filtered through Hunspell dictionaries.
- emoji data
- Unicode CLDR annotations and Signal’s emoji search data, via aosp-dictionaries.
- type
- PT Sans by ParaType, SIL Open Font License.