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.
You should give this a quick edit, the feature is literally the opposite of what you wrote. “Text to Speech” is an app reading text out loud as a voice to you. “Speech to text” is the keyboard feature.
Agreed and done.
Thank you, I was going to comment this but decided to check if someone else had already.
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
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?
Also wasn’t this open source? Couldn’t one of these holier than thou privacy people just create a branch without the service and side load it?
On desktop anyways, the Instance Assistant extension ( !instance_assistant@lemmy.ca ) can let you jump between posts. I haven’t figured out a pattern on what the mobile apps are doing. Sometimes when I copy the link it’s from my home instance, sometimes it’s not.
ex. Here is the same post on a few different instances, generated by the extension:
Ok i would like to defend them here. It is not a standard tracker like what u would expect. It is a crash log that sends crash logs to a them only if you agree to it. I would arfue this is fair but use it how u see fit and dont send ur reports if u dont want to.
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.
I’ve spent countless hours over the last couple years, since I left the Googs, trying to find a good alternative for STT. I love that I just bumped into this post and it seems to be the answer I’m looking for. I’ve been playing around with it today and it works pretty great. Thanks OP!
Oh my god, this just made my life fucking perfect!
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.
They, uh, maybe should have workshoped that name a little more before settling on it.
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Yes it leads me to assume there are… surprise features
We added this to thumb-key recently it’s a great app.
So is Thumb-Key, so thank you.
Is there any good TTS? RHvoice is kinda robotic, and the output volume is rather low, not ideal on a motorbike.
Works amazingly but anyone know how to support without google play
There is a payment option inside the app. It uses Stripe to process the payment.
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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.
Only to download the model, then it works offline (at least on Pixels with Tensor, not sure about the rest)
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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
have you tried openboard?
openboard lacks a japanese IME, so it’s useless to me
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.
My main issue with Android keyboards is that i need multiple languages on the fly, i might be chatting in one language in one group and on another language on another, or even some limited mix and match in a single phrase. Currently using AnySoftKeyboard, since i can switch languages with a button, but oh damn is the prediction abysmal, looks like it only brings up all the potential words on any order and doesn’t even consider which one’s the most likely, no idea how’s it in reality but it feels like this.
If OpenBoard can cover my use case I’ll switch immediately.
there is this issue on github for a while. Could use a boost
Well damn, i like this idea!
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.
No, (Polish and Spanish and more) watch the vid about it
No. Videos aren’t good content for some people or places.
I installed it after this post, and i’m loving it Thank you
There were some other attempts to do stt, but they all were terrible This app doesn’tlooks like anything of them, feels and looks like google stt, but not google
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