Poor German word suggestions and spell checking with default AOSP keyboard on /e/OS 4.0 (Fairphone 6)

Using /e/OS Applications
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Hi everyone,

I recently updated to /e/OS 4.0 on a Fairphone 6 and noticed that the default Android Keyboard (AOSP) performs surprisingly poorly for German.

One example is the word “überhaupt”:

  • When I type uberh (or even uberhau), the keyboard does not suggest überhaupt.

  • Even when I type almost the complete word (überhaup), it still does not appear as a suggestion.

  • The spell checker also marks überhaupt as incorrect, although it is obviously a valid and very common German word.

Initially I suspected that the German dictionary might be incomplete.

However, I tested several other common words:

  • uber → über :white_check_mark:

  • fur → für :white_check_mark:

  • gross → groß :white_check_mark:

  • schon → schön :white_check_mark:

So umlaut handling appears to work in general, which makes the missing suggestions for words like überhaupt even more surprising.

I also verified that:

  • Keyboard: Android Keyboard (AOSP)

  • Spell checker: AOSP

  • Language: German

  • Device: Fairphone 6

  • /e/OS version: 4.0

As an experiment I installed HeliBoard, and the difference is immediately noticeable. German suggestions and autocorrect are significantly better, and words like überhaupt are suggested as expected.

Has anyone else observed this with the default AOSP keyboard on recent /e/OS versions? Is this a known issue with the bundled German dictionary or the prediction engine?

I’d be happy to provide more examples or help test if this is considered a bug.

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I struggle with this every once in a while but am not an expert on the topic and cannot explain the differences in keyboard behaviour as I assumed, they would use the very same internal dictionaries, but maybe each (or some) bring their own (?)

Maybe UDM is for you. It allows management of the internal dictionary/database via gui and eg import whole databases/wordlists for specific languages…

I haven’t tried it intensively myself but it looks capable. Check info on website first though.

PS: I manually added überhaupt :grinning_face:

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Thank you @obacht. UDM looks promising. Maybe I will give it a try. But actually I was hoping for a solution where I do not need to maintain a personal dictionary at all. So far Heliboard works quite well, while also not being perfect. It does not know “ändern” for example which is also a pretty common word. So the journey goes on :slight_smile:

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Sure, but maybe importing/adding the available german word lists inside udm will help anyways…

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I had the same problem with German dictionaries in different keyplboard apps. My favourite right now is FUTO Keyboard. It is fully offline and has a very interesting feature set apart from having one of the best dictionaries for my use, yet.

You can get it via several sources, including F-Droid (through their own repo) and GitHub. https://keyboard.futo.org/

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Thank you @sophimae. Will try this.

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Second the recommendation for FUTO keyboard. It can even handle CJK, swipe typing and do on-device voice recognition.

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I tried FUTO Keyboard and I really like it. Even though it did also not know a few common German words in the first place. After downloading an experimental German Dictionary (which you can do conveniently in the app) it now works like a charm. It looks really modern (more then heliboard) and is pretty customizable. I was really excited seeing you can download a model to allow for fully offline Speech To Text. Also you can download Transformer models to boost auto suggestion with this technology. Again fully offline, though currently still experimental and only for English.

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