AI keyboards: which ones run on your phone?
"AI keyboard" says nothing about where the AI runs. Some of these send your text to a server and some do not, and the listing copy is nearly identical either way. Here is what three of them say in their own documentation, quoted, with the date I read it. I make one of the three, so check that section hardest.
I make Lexo, so read the part about where it loses most carefully. Thirty days free, then $9.99 once. Get it on Google Play
Why this is the only question that matters
An AI keyboard that calls a server is a text box with a network dependency. It stops working on a plane, it gets slower on bad wifi, and whatever you were typing went somewhere. An AI keyboard that runs the model on the phone has to ship the model, which makes it a big download and constrains how large the model can be. Both are legitimate designs. They are just not the same product, and the marketing rarely distinguishes them.
So: go find the sentence in the vendor's own privacy policy that says where inference happens. If there is no such sentence, that is itself the answer to how much they want you thinking about it.
CleverType
Multi-platform rather than a keyboard alone. Their site (read 2026-08-01) lists Android and iOS keyboards, a Chrome extension, Edge, Firefox, and a desktop app.
Their privacy policy (clevertype.co/privacy-policy, read 2026-08-01) describes both paths. Server side: "AI usage data collected is immediately encrypted and transmitted through secure, encrypted connections to our servers solely for improving our AI prediction models." On device: the same page refers to features that run "locally on your device that do not require communication with our servers."
What that page does not do is say which specific features are in which bucket. On what leaves the phone it is more concrete, and reads well: "Only your email address when you create an account," plus "Anonymous metrics about how you use AI-powered features (frequency of AI suggestions, acceptance rates)," and an explicit denial, "We do not collect, store, or transmit your actual typed content."
Two things I could not establish and will not guess at: their pricing page did not render an actual price when I read it, and their docs did not say whether an account is required to use the keyboard at all rather than just to manage a subscription.
Yaps
Yaps is a voice product first, and on Android that means a dictation keyboard: "Voice-type into any app with the Yaps keyboard" (yaps.ai, read 2026-08-01). The homepage claims "~300ms to text," "On-device No cloud round-trip," and "Works offline Airplane mode ready."
Their privacy policy (yaps.ai/privacy, read 2026-08-01) backs that up and then draws the line honestly: "Core workflows can run on your device using local models and platform capabilities. When local processing is used, audio stays on your device." And the other half: "Some premium voices and advanced features use cloud processing," with the choice exposed to you, since users "can switch between local and cloud-capable options in Settings."
Credit where it is due, because this is a competitor: on Android their voice typing is listed at "$0/forever," and by their own documentation it runs locally. If offline dictation is the only thing you want, that is a serious answer and it costs nothing. Their paid tier, $12 a month billed annually, is about the desktop apps rather than the Android keyboard. Their policy also lists an account email, plan and billing identifiers, feature usage counters, and crash diagnostics as things that leave the device, and says those diagnostics exclude your dictated content.
Lexo
Mine. Everything runs on the phone, and the specifics are the answer rather than the adjective: suggestions ranked by Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct at q8_0 through llama.cpp on the CPU, dictation by an NVIDIA Parakeet transducer as int8 ONNX through sherpa-onnx, transcript cleanup by a small ELECTRA-based tagger plus a rule pass. No account, no login, no server to call.
The cost of that design is honest to state: about 1.2 GB of models download on first run, a 0.5B model is smaller than anything a server would run, and the app is closed source, so the claim rests on five permissions and a packet capture rather than on readable code. $9.99 once after a 30-day trial, no subscription and no ads.
Picking between them
- You want free offline dictation and nothing else: Yaps on Android, by their own documentation, at no cost.
- You want the same assistant across a browser, a desktop and a phone, and you are comfortable with some processing happening on a server: CleverType is built for that shape and the others are not.
- You want one keyboard where both the suggestions and the dictation run on the phone, and you would rather pay once than subscribe: Lexo.
Whichever you pick, the check is the same and takes a minute. Turn the network off and use the feature you are paying for. If it still works, it was on your phone.
Lexo is the keyboard this is about. Thirty days free, then $9.99 once, no subscription and no ads. Get it on Google Play
More: six Android keyboards on what each actually sends, running a 0.5B language model inside a keyboard, what offline dictation actually means, and is Lexo safe.