FAQ
Fifteen questions, each answered in its first line. If yours is not here, the writing guide has the whole scheme and the download page has the install steps.
Yes. The keyboard is free to use, with no ads and no account to make.
The engine, the apps built on it and the scripts that build them are all MIT licensed, so anyone can read the source, change it, or ship their own version, including for a platform Obadh has not reached yet. What the license lets you do is on the about page.
No.
Transliteration, corrections, next-word suggestions and emoji search all happen inside the keyboard. There is no account, no sync, no telemetry, and the keyboard has no networking code in it. What Obadh does with your typing names the file behind each of those claims, and shows you how to check them in a clone.
Completely.
Turn off Wi-Fi and mobile data and nothing about typing changes: the rules, the 845,461-word dictionary and, on iPhone and iPad, the next-word model are all inside the app already.
For two things: the tap you feel under your finger, and the settings you chose in the Obadh app.
Say no and the keyboard still works. You type, the Bangla appears, corrections and suggestions come. What you lose is the haptics, any setting you change in the app, and the words it would have learned from you. The install steps say where the switch is.
Almost. Four things are spelled differently: long vowels, the diphthongs, a bare w, and খণ্ড ত.
The guide keeps all four in one section, and the ones people trip on are near the top of the page.
So you can type Bangla the same way on every device you own, from something anyone is free to read, change and build on.
Avro made writing Bangla by sound ordinary, and that part is not up for revisiting. But a keyboard has to be written again for every platform it reaches. Where it came from is the longer answer, including what the two projects do and do not share.
Keep Bijoy for that work.
Someone trained on a fixed layout, typing all day, is faster than almost anyone typing by sound, and Bijoy is what offices, newsrooms and job-exam typing tests are set on. Obadh is for the rest of your typing, on whatever device is in front of you. On a Mac the two are input sources in the same list.
Yes. Obadh composes whatever you spell, and the part that turns your letters into Bangla holds no dictionary at all.
Corrections are the part that leans: they are built from Bangla Wikipedia, curated books and the archive of a Bangladeshi newspaper. Nothing is inserted for you unless you switch that on, and picking your own spelling out of the strip once protects it. A word that is missing, or ranked wrongly, is one line in obadh_autocorrect_dataset.
Type the consonants in a row and Obadh joins them: kt gives ক্ত, ndr gives ন্দ্র, three consonants and all.
To keep two apart, put an o between them, so kk is ক্ক and kok is কক. Reph is a doubled r before the letter it sits over: rrk gives র্ক. The guide has the conjuncts, reph and the phola marks as full tables, and the three ways to type জ্ঞ.
Just type them. aYp gives অ্যাপ, waTar gives ওয়াটার, box gives বক্স.
Autocorrect knows 1,776 English words in the spellings people really write, and loanwords have a section of their own in the guide. If the English should stay in Latin letters, switch keyboards and come back; a word you left half-finished is still where you left it.
Because a keyboard that changes a word you meant costs you more than one that leaves a typo alone.
You still get the corrections: they sit next to what you typed, and taking one is a tap. Turn on auto-insert and the space bar takes the correction for you, but only when what you typed is not a word at all, or is rare enough that the correction is fifty times more common.
Yes. Messages, mail, notes, browsers, editors, anywhere the system lets a keyboard in.
Obadh installs as a system input method, not as an app you type inside, so there is nothing to open first and nothing to paste out of. Two exceptions belong to iOS rather than to Obadh: secure fields always bring up the system keyboard, and an app is allowed to refuse third-party keyboards outright, which some banking apps do.
Three, and you can keep more than one.
Obadh is an input source for macOS 15 or later; OmicronLab’s iAvro carries the Avro Phonetic scheme and lists macOS 10.15 as the newest system it supports; Lekho is open source and built on OpenBangla’s riti engine. macOS holds as many input sources as you like, so adding one takes nothing away. The install steps are on the download page.
No dates, and none of the four has been started in the open yet.
iPhone, iPad and Mac are what you can install today. Each of the others needs an input method written against its own framework, and that is most of the work. In the meantime, on Linux, OpenBangla Keyboard is free software and carries Avro Phonetic alongside Probhat, Munir Optima and Jatiya.
GitHub, in the repository that owns the problem.
obadh_engine for a wrong letter or a rule that misfires, obadh-ios for the keyboard, obadh-macos for the Mac input method. Where to start has the rest, including a test that tells you which repository a problem belongs to.