Looking so nice

[Joaov41]

I wish I could have visit your GitHub earlier this week. I just spent the last few days writing the same thing, a custom keyboard inspired by the Writing Tool, complementing this way the IOS port I did of the app.
But your version here is more advance than mine. Mine is working well in terms of functionality, still testing, but your looks much nicer, but glad to see we reached the same conclusion on how to get custom commends into the very limited constraint of custom keyboards imposed by Apple.
Looking forward to collaborate with you in this version as well.
Would love to hear your thought on the IOS port and maybe brainstorm on who to goo around the sandbox limitations of IOS apps. Congrats

[Aryamirsepasi]

Hi @Joaov41, thank you for your kind words! I haven't tested your version yet, but it looks very impressive from the screenshots, particularly the image recognition feature and the text sharing via the share sheet. Both of those could be incredibly useful.
Developing the iOS version has been quite challenging. 😅 Initially, I planned to create a full third-party keyboard with letters, symbols, variations, and more. Ironically, this aspect proved to be more complicated than the AI tools themselves. No matter how hard I tried, the keyboard and character variation pop-up didn't look right. Consequently, I decided to make the keyboard AI-tools-only. This way, users can use the default iOS keyboard for all their basic typing and then simply use the Globe button to access the AI tools.

Also, unfortunately, it's not possible to implement local LLM processing in third-party keyboards on iOS, even for very small models, due to its limited RAM access. That's why my version uses Cloud LLMs for the keyboard, and both Cloud & Local LLMs for the chat app.

I hope we can collaborate again in the future.

[Joaov41]

Yes, I know what you mean. I tried exactly the same thing, so I also had to resort to AI only for my keyboard. I will put my code up on GitHub. As I said, the UI doesn’t look very good, I never had much talent for Ui design. However, the functionality is okay. I was able to get it to work without having to copy manually the selected text to the clipboard each time. It is now a work in progress.
As for the iOS port of the Writing tools, I find it very useful. It is always there on the side during my reading sessions, mostly for summaries and key points.

Of course, due to the sandbox limitations, the writing options themselves involve copy and paste , that is why I started to develop the keyboard for In line replacement of the text. That way, the combination of both mimics all the functionality of the Mac app.
For sure , happy to contribute whenever i can.

[Joaov41]

Here is my current code for the custom keyboard.
https://github.com/Joaov41/keygem/

It is a very, very rough first try; I started off from the iOS port, so there is still a lot of redundant code here that needs to be cleaned up, but the main functionality is there. It needs UI improvements, the API key is horde-coded so it needs a landing page, a lot to do still.
If you want to take a look because I was able to get it to work without having to copy the text to the clipboard first before using any of the options. It detects the text selection. Maybe you can use this small part on your much better project, which is much better.

[Aryamirsepasi]

Hi @Joaov41, sorry for the late response. I finally tested your approach and I think there is limit to this in iOS.
What you did is similar to how Swiftkey works. It does allow direct text recognition without needing for copy and paste, but iOS has a 200 character limit on this approach. So for example if you select a long email and open the keyboard, the whole email text will not be recognized. While using a button to get the copied text might be a bit inconvenient, I personally think it is worth it in terms of the text length that can be given to AI. What do you think? If you can think of another solution I'll be happy to hear it. 😄

[Joaov41]

Omg stupid me I totally forgot about the 200 characters limit and ended up never testing with longer content.
What do you think of a hybrid approach? Automatically detect when the selected text exceeds the 200-character limit and then in that case prompt the user for copy paste. I don’t know maybe too convoluted. Right now my development is on hold unfortunately for health issues. Will be back hopefully very soon. Keep up the good work.

[smailpouri]

Hello,
I understand the Apple Limitation as to why there was no on-device option for the keyboard setting and though I would share this clever trick below, maybe that would give you additional ideas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckeo6iqewv8

That shortcut can easily be adapted to be used with apps other than ChatGPT, but I have not found another one with an on-device LLM that has an App Shortcut.

I was wondering if it might be possible in the future to connect to a remote instance of Ollama or LM Studio (for more data privacy)