LocalType

Install

1. Open the downloaded APK. Allow your browser to install apps if Android asks.
2. Open LocalType and follow the walkthrough to enable and select the keyboard.
3. Try typing. Hold space to switch keyboards; reopen Setup walkthrough under About whenever needed.

Your words stay on your phone

Suggestions, corrections and learning all run on the phone. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, and there is no account to make. LocalType’s own code goes online only when you ask it to: to download the optional proofreading model, or when you tap Check for updates. The one part of the app that could use the network unasked is a Google library for the optional proofreading, described at the end of this section.

• It learns only real words you finish. Misspellings are never learned, password fields get no suggestions, and nothing typed in an incognito field is saved.
• The word pairs it has learned are listed in settings. Remove one line, or tap Forget learned words to clear everything it has learned.
• Typing uses no Google service and no Google model. The suggestions come from a model I trained myself, and the word lists are in the app.
• What you dictate is never learned or logged. Android asks for the microphone the first time you tap the mic key, not before, and your voice goes to Android’s on-device speech recognizer, which on a Pixel has no network permission.

A plain keyboard, with the tools within reach

• Typo fixes you can undo. Clear slips are fixed when you press space. Press delete right away, or tap Undo, to keep what you typed.
• IPA symbols and accented letters. Hold a letter and slide to the one you want.
• Voice input. Tap the microphone key beside the emoji button and speak; tap it again, or any key, to stop. It uses Android’s on-device speech recognizer, on phones that have one. New in 0.5.15 and still being tested.
• Emoji, clipboard and Saved text. A full emoji grid with search, a paste button for what you just copied, and Saved text for the things you type again and again.
• A list of the word pairs it has learned. Read it, trim it or clear it.
• TalkBack. Every key can be explored and typed with a screen reader.
• The usual comforts. Light and dark themes, a number row if you want one, and pads for numbers, phone numbers, email and web addresses.

What it leaves out: glide typing, GIFs and stickers, and languages other than English. If you depend on one of those, LocalType is not for you yet.

How well it fixes typos

I typed the same 100 invented sentences into LocalType and Gboard on two Pixels, using scripted taps scattered a little around each key. In an ordinary text field, with the taps scattered 14 and 23.5 pixels, LocalType fixed 134 and 127 of 200 planted typos where Gboard fixed 103 and 106. At 33 pixels it was 110 against 100, too close to tell apart. Both sometimes turned a typo into the wrong word: 15 against 10 at the tightest scatter, then 15 against 21 and 26 against 38. These counts are from the Pixel 9a; the Pixel 10 matched them to within two words.

In a separate probe on 150 human-written phrases, next-word suggestions were level. So was the delay between a tap and the letter reaching the text field, to within 3 ms at the median. Scripted taps are not human typing, and I have not yet measured typing speed with real fingers. The benchmark page has the method, the tables and the limits.

Where the suggestions come from

The three suggestions above the keys come from Chime, a 2 MB model I trained myself on public text with checked licences. It is built into the app, needs no download and runs on the phone. It is not Gemma or Gemini. You can try it in a browser on the Chime page, where the weights, the training code and the method are linked.

If you also want sentence proofreading, LocalType can use Gemini Nano on phones that offer it, or a 2.4 GB Gemma download. Both run on the phone and both stay off until you ask. The keyboard is complete without them.