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Re: Curious what you use for offline keyboard/STT (speech to text) on Android

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Andy Burns wrote:
> My eyes aren't the best, but providing I've got the right set of glasses 
> on they do OK on phones/tablets.

I envy those like you who can see the phone without too much trouble.

Me? I like to make the phone two feet tall on the PC using scrcpy, which,
after all, is what caused me to have to figure out what STT to implement. 

What happened was I had Samsung keyboard doing just fine with the Samsung
models tucked away in its private sandbox but then I used "scrcpy -k"
instead of "scrcpy --keyboard=sdk" to halve the number of steps to bring up
the keyboard from two steps (click & type) to one step (type).

Samsung Keyboard's internal services (including the Voice-to-Text listener)
went into a Sleep/Suppressed state because the InputMethodService detected
a hardware override. I thought the app was corrupted, but it was just
standing down to let the hardware (scrcpy) take over.

That broke my Samsung voice-to-text implementation, so I did the "rm -rf *"
of wiping out not only Samsung Keyboard's Cache, but also offline Data!

That deleted the offline acoustic models and language packs that Samsung
downloads on-demand after the first boot after a factory reset.
 /data/user/0/com.samsung.android.honeyboard/

That wiped out the models stored in Samsung Keyboard's sandbox, and, w/o a
Samsung account, you can't get that back (as far as I am able to tell).	 

I didn't know that when "scrcpy -k" hides the keyboard, all I needed to do
in the Samsung Keyboard settings was toggle "Show Keyboard while physical
keyboard is connected" which keeps the internal services (and the models)
alive while still letting me type 100x faster from my PC keyboard.	 

At this point, I could do a factory reset since when Samsung ships a phone,
they don't expect everyone to have a Samsung account immediately.
Therefore, they pre-load a base version of the voice models inside the
system partition (or a hidden carrier/vendor partition). These aren't
stored in the active "Honeyboard" folder but they are stored as compressed
resource files within the system's protected apps. 

Since I'm unrooted, even with Shizuku, I can't see into that partition.

But I just invested a few hours into getting STT to work with Whisper and
HeliBoard (which is a port of OpenBoard) that I wish I had known about
AJL's suggestion to use Futo/Whisper instead since it's more elegant.

The basic difference between those two implementation is my current
implementation is modular while Futo's implementation is integrated.

First, the Heliboard mic sends a RECOGNIZE_SPEECH Intent voice request
& then Android picks a registered service & sends it to WhisperIME
where the audio goes from a hardware mic to the OS to WhisperIME, & then
after translation, back to the OS to HeliBoard to the text edit field.

With the much fatter Futo binary, the Whisper.cpp engine is already 
compiled into the keyboard, so there are no interprocess communications.
Futo opens its own audio streams and types directly into the text field.

While that all-in-one model is much like the Samsung/Google model, what's
different is Futo can import models that Google/Samsung can't import.

Did I mention that speech to text on Android is complicated yet?

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Thread

Curious what you use for offline keyboard/STT (speech to text) on Android Maria Sophia <mariasophia@comprehension.com> - 2026-04-27 18:58 -0600
  Re: Curious what you use for offline keyboard/STT (speech to text) on Android Arno Welzel <usenet@arnowelzel.de> - 2026-04-28 09:48 +0200
    Re: Curious what you use for offline keyboard/STT (speech to text) on Android Maria Sophia <mariasophia@comprehension.com> - 2026-04-28 14:48 -0600
      Re: Curious what you use for offline keyboard/STT (speech to text) on Android Maria Sophia <mariasophia@comprehension.com> - 2026-04-28 19:05 -0600
  Re: Curious what you use for offline keyboard/STT (speech to text) on Android Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> - 2026-04-28 09:05 +0100
    Re: Curious what you use for offline keyboard/STT (speech to text) on Android Maria Sophia <mariasophia@comprehension.com> - 2026-04-28 13:32 -0600
      Re: Curious what you use for offline keyboard/STT (speech to text) on Android Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> - 2026-04-28 21:20 +0100
        Re: Curious what you use for offline keyboard/STT (speech to text) on Android Maria Sophia <mariasophia@comprehension.com> - 2026-04-28 19:34 -0600
          Re: Curious what you use for offline keyboard/STT (speech to text) on Android AJL <noemail@none.com> - 2026-04-29 02:56 +0000
            Re: Curious what you use for offline keyboard/STT (speech to text) on Android Maria Sophia <mariasophia@comprehension.com> - 2026-04-29 01:25 -0600
              Re: Curious what you use for offline keyboard/STT (speech to text) on Android Richmond <dnomhcir@gmx.com> - 2026-04-29 09:28 +0100
                Re: Curious what you use for offline keyboard/STT (speech to text) on Android AJL <noemail@none.com> - 2026-04-29 16:02 +0000
                Re: Curious what you use for offline keyboard/STT (speech to text) on Android Maria Sophia <mariasophia@comprehension.com> - 2026-04-29 12:15 -0600

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