Acti keyboard brings AI agents to your phone. You write a task, hold a key – and it's done

The Acti keyboard from the OpenActi startup doesn’t suggest what word to type next. You type your intent into the text field, hold down a key – and it translates a message, finds a restaurant, or inserts a meeting link. Directly within the app you’re currently using.

Write your intent, hold the key. AI will take care of the rest

The principle that OpenActi demonstrates on its website is simple – “press to type, hold to act”. During normal typing, Acti behaves like any other keyboard. But once you type your intent and hold the Acti Bar, the AI agent will perform the task and show you a preview before sending.

You can also assign so-called Skill Keys to individual keys – for example, a long press of the letter “T” might translate a draft message. You can build your own skills in the Skill Builder tool without a single line of code, and the community library already offers over 1,000 ready-made skills connected to Notion, Gmail, Calendly, and a hundred other services. The official video shows what it all looks like in practice:

Former Baidu executive, $5.3 million, and Gemini

Behind the project is Young Wang, who led the Facemoji keyboard at Baidu for almost a decade – it was used by over 300 million people daily. According to TechCrunch, the startup secured a $5.3 million seed investment led by BITKRAFT Ventures.

Under the hood run Google Gemini models, which Wang chose for their balance of intelligence, speed, and cost. The basic version is free; over time, it plans to monetize through subscriptions with more powerful models and higher daily limits. And privacy? The company promises a “local-first” approach – personal context remains on your device by default, and private messages are reportedly not read by the app unless you explicitly invoke a function requiring off-phone processing.

⌨️ Does Acti support Czech? The app interface is currently only in English. Since last December, the keyboard supports typing in 34 languages – among the examples the company names (French, Spanish, Japanese…), Czech is not listed, and OpenActi does not provide a complete list. It can translate messages thanks to Gemini; verify Czech typing support directly in the app before full deployment.

What do early users say?

On Product Hunt, Acti won product of the day with 535 points, and comments sound promising. “I unexpectedly often use Acti more for quickly finding and doing things than for generating text,” writes user Nicole H.

The Google Play store does not yet display an overall rating. iPhone owners can find Acti on the App Store (requires iOS 17 and newer), where it currently holds 3.7 stars from only seven ratings – so it’s too early to judge.

Would you let an AI agent into your keyboard?