FUTO Voice Input

FUTO Voice Input is an application that lets you do speech-to-text on Android, integrating with third party keyboards or apps that use the generic speech-to-text APIs.

To download the application, visit the FUTO Voice Input page. You can also find the contact there to report issues or suggestions.

If you have any feedback, issues are welcomed on the public issue tracker. Private inquiries are welcomed at the support email listed on the website, or via the Send Feedback button in-app.

API support

The following APIs are supported:

android.speech.action.RECOGNIZE_SPEECH implicit intent, for apps and some keyboards - this opens the floating window in the center of the screen
IME with voice subtype mode, for keyboards - this opens on the bottom half of the screen in place of the keyboard

Currently this does not support the SpeechRecognizer API, which few apps seem to use. Support for this is planned in the future.

Keyboard support

Keyboard support is touched on in the Help section of the app. In short, the following keyboards are supported:

AOSP Keyboard, which uses the IME
OpenBoard, which uses the IME
AnySoftKeyboard, which uses the implicit intent. This keyboard has some voice input usability issues but this is being worked on
Unexpected Keyboard (v1.23+), which uses the IME

If you're okay with using proprietary keyboards, the following are supported:

Grammarly Keyboard, which uses the IME
Microsoft SwiftKey, which uses the implicit intent

Incompatible keyboards:

Gboard - has its own thing
Samsung Keyboard - hardcoded to only allow either Samsung Voice Input, or Google Voice Input
Simple Keyboard by Raimondas Rimkus - no voice button
Simple Keyboard by Simple Mobile Tools - no voice button
TypeWise - no voice button but suggestion filed in 2019

Language support

FUTO Voice Input is currently based on the OpenAI Whisper model, and could theoretically support all of the languages that OpenAI Whisper supports. However, in practice, the smaller models tend to not perform too good with languages that had fewer training hours. To avoid presenting something worse than nothing, only languages with more than 1,000 training hours are included as options in the UI:

English
Chinese (currently has some weird behavior between traditional/simplified)
German
Spanish
Russian
French
Portuguese
Korean
Japanese
Turkish
Polish
Italian
Swedish
Dutch
Catalan
Finnish
Indonesian

Language support and accuracy may expand in the future with better optimization and fine-tuned models. Feedback is welcomed about language-related issues or general language accuracy.

Development

You can develop this app by opening it in Android Studio. Otherwise, you can use Gradle to build the app like so:

./gradlew assembleStandaloneRelease

There are four build flavors:

dev - for development, includes Play Store billing and all payment methods, auto-update, etc
playStore - Play Store build, does not include auto-update and only includes Play Store billing
standalone - does not include Play Store billing library, includes auto-update
fDroid - does not include Play Store billing nor auto-update

Some prebuilt binaries are included in the libs directory to make the build faster, there are also instructions to build them yourself.