dynamic-zhuyin-keyboard

Inspiration

Most Android Zhuyin keyboards are either difficult to customize, rely heavily on cloud services, or do not feel natural for Taiwanese users. I wanted a privacy-first keyboard that works offline and can be adjusted to match the user's typing habits.

What it does

Dynamic Zhuyin Keyboard is an Android keyboard designed for Traditional Chinese users in Taiwan. It supports customizable key layout, on-device user dictionary learning, candidate suggestions, and learning-data management without requiring network access.

How we built it

The keyboard is built with Kotlin for Android. Codex and GPT-5.6 were used to review the existing codebase, implement new features, improve user-dictionary behavior, test builds, and document the development process.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenges were handling Zhuyin composition correctly, ranking candidates naturally, keeping learning data safe, and making import/export reliable for larger dictionaries.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created a working offline Zhuyin keyboard with customizable layout and local learning. During the hackathon, we focused on improving the user dictionary, learning controls, import/export, and typing reliability.

What we learned

We learned that keyboard quality depends on many small details, including composition behavior, candidate ranking, layout spacing, and data safety. AI-assisted development was most useful when paired with repeated testing on a real device.

What's next for dynamic-zhuyin-keyboard

Next, we plan to improve composing text and candidate ranking, add more Taiwanese vocabulary, refine the UI, expand testing, and prepare a stable public release.

Built With

• keyb