Right To Repair Advocate Louis Rossman recently announced the release of FUTO, a Text To Speech App that respects your privacy.
After having played around with FUTO on my GrapheneOS Pixel, I can honestly say it’s nice to have. Using the Openboards Keyboard, I’ll admit that the one thing I missed about Gboards was its text to speech capability, but I refused to use it because it logs everything said into it.
IMHO, the team that developed FUTO have created something truly special here, and I’d recommend anyone to at least try it out.
There is a one time $10 payment, but the developers have basically made this more like an opt in donation, as you can just click ‘I Already Paid’ and utilize the app regardless of whether you paid or not. If you try FUTO out, and like it, maybe throw them a few bucks.
Here is an invidious link of Rossman talking about FUTO and its features.
Some folks on the !android@lemdro.id post about this the other day cautioned about a tracker present in the app.
i wasn’t aware. Could you link the specific post? It’s not up on the feed from that community in jerboa…
EDIT: Found it. okay, yes, FUTO does have some telemetry issues. Glad I posted this as it needs this kind of scrutiny thank you!
On the flip side, I now have another Lemmy community I joined and the Exodus App that catches these sorts of trackers is pretty cool. I already had revoked FUTO’s network permissions on GrapheneOS, so hopefully that mitigates the telemetry problem.
I wish we had universal links to specific posts! Glad you were able to find it. Link for others: https://lemdro.id/post/2022094 - seems to be a few updates since my last visit.
It’s important to clarify here that this “tracker” is a service that allows the develops to upload their crash reports. Furthermore it only triggers when the app crashed and even then you have to actively allow it to be send.
Also important, the same tracker exists in the official F-Droid client app. Could it really be that big if a concern if it exists there too?
On GrapheneOS you can disable GBoard’s network (after downloading the STT model, took a day or so when I did it) and uninstall google services and it still works fine…
Interesting. I was under the impression that Google’s SST required Network access.
I’ve been using it for a couple of days and good to finally have a non Google option
You don’t find the accuracy to be an issue? Especially at the speed its going I expected closer results
The settings do have a slower option that according to Rossman is more accurate. I have not played with it cuz I personally have no issues with the accuracy at the default speed.
For clarity, as it took me a min to understand. This is Speech to Text software, not Text to Speech. It’s about you taking to your phone, not your phone talking to you.
Yes. Agreed and Edited.
is this english only?
Futo supports the following languages:
English, Chinese, German, Spanish, Russian, French, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, Turkish, Polish, Italian, Swedish, Dutch, Catalan, Finnish, and Indonesian.
now they just need to make a keyboard, and make it integrate a jp ime… there are so few good keyboards that meet all the boxes on android…
as far as i know the only two keyboards that have decent english prediction and a jp ime are the gboard and anthy, both options suck fof different reasons
I love Openboard as it has the closest layouts to Gboards (looks almost exactly the same imo). But I’ll admit that it’s prediction, while usually fine, can be very janky when trying to just edit a block of text. It will often delete the last space, undo the recent character edit, or jump to a different part of the text block when typing out the new edit.
All that said, the GrapheneOS default keyboard is just too basic imho, and while FlorisBoard is nice, it had worse prediction from what I observed.
The best is Gboards, and as another poster pointed out, you can just turn off Network access foe it to prevent telemetry. I just would prefer to use a competitor.
