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.
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 - seems to be a few updates since my last visit.
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.
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:
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.
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!
