Heliboard is trying to collect data from volunteers, to help us make gesture typing better! The data collection period ends November 30th 2026, but getting data in before that is really helpful.

You can find a video containing some more details on PeerTube or YouTube

Installing the FDroid version of Heliboard, using the FDroid client, is suggested unless you know what you are doing; Installing manually will not provide you with updates.

• How to install F-Droid
• Heliboard on F-Droid
• Heliboard on Github

After you have finished installing Heliboard, it is highly recommended you poke around in the settings and customise it to your liking!

Some devices come with an appropriate proprietary library preinstalled, which will let Heliboard do gesture typing out of the box. If that isn't the case on your device, you will need to download a library manually. You can know immediately if gesture typing is working by seeing if the "Gesture typing" and "Gesture data gathering" options exist in the settings screen.

Here is an example without gesture typing available.

Here is an example with gesture typing available.

You will need to know the architecture of your CPU, which Heliboard will tell you when you try to load a library file.

Go to Heliboard settings ➜ Advanced ➜ Load gesture typing library.

The device in the picture would correspond to ARM64.

Once you know which library to download, find it in the options below.

Then, through the same dialogue we used to find the architecture of your device, you can tap "load library" and find the appropriate file you downloaded

After loading the library, you should now be able to access gesture data gathering.

Go to Heliboard settings ➜ gesture data gathering

Tap "start active gathering", and just gesture the words you see on screen!

In this example we want you to gesture "crunch".

As a note, you will need to make sure that Heliboard is the keyboard you are currently using, otherwise we won't be able to record the gestures you make. You will know when a gesture was recognised, because the word will change!

You don't need to do all your gesture making at once. Leaving the gesture data gathering screen won't cause any data to be lost.

If for some reason you don't want to gesture a specific word you can skip it, using the "skip word" button. One reason you might skip a word is you find it far too long for you to comfortably gesture, meaning it might be genuinely unpleasant to do so to the point you would never do it in real life.

If you gestured a word, in a way you are very certain was correct, but Heliboard didn't accept it - that could mean the proprietary gesture library did a particularly bad job at recognising the gesture you drew. If you are certain you gestured a word correctly, you can force Heliboard to accept it by pressing the button that pops up in the bottom right. We ask you to please not abuse this feature though. It does make our job harder.

You don't need to be perfect with the gestures you create. We want to make the user experience better, we aren't trying to bend you to the existing user experience. Though, inevitably, as you gesture more words you will get better at doing what the existing experience wants you to do.

Inside the gesture data gathering screen, there is a share button in the bottom right. It is possible for the buttons that pop up during active gathering to cover the share button, but if you go back out of active gathering, you should see it again.

If you tap that button, you will be asked whether you would like to share all the gestures you have made, or just the ones you haven't exported before. If you are feeling very unsure about what to do, you can share all gestures. The only times these will be different is if you exported some data already but chose not to delete it for whatever reason. For instance, you may have wanted to inspect some data yourself before sending it to us.

From here, just pick an email app on your device to send the email from. Heliboard will make an email for you, addressed to us with your data attached. Double check the zip file is attached and hit send!

If something goes wrong: you can export the gesture data to your device, make a new email to us, and attach the zip file containing the gestures manually.

Things you might want to know if you customise your keyboard a lot and want to contribute data. Especially if you want to submit data that isn't in English. These things are likely not to be a problem if you don't customise much though!

The only dictionaries we are collecting data from are either shipped by default in Heliboard or found in testing dictionaries repository. If we can't find the word the gesture resolved to, to reproduce the gesture, we can't really use it effectively! To make things simpler for us, we will only collect data from the dictionaries in Heliboard or from the aforementioned repository.

Keyboards that have the same key in multiple locations, on the base layer, will not function the way you expect when gesture typing. Only one of the keys will be considered a valid key to gesture type with. This is a limitation of gesture typing generally, that we don't know a way around. Sorry! It also may be quite confusing for us when we try to look through the data in the future. We recommend you don't do this!

The gesturing library we had you download hard codes where letters with diatrics are expected to be. If you move them around, it won't do anything... because they will be ignored in favour of how the library hard codes it. Technically it won't exactly break anything. It will just mean we need to edit the data you send us later.

For instance é should be on the long press of e, and ß should be on the long press of s.