A Singapore-based startup called Acti has embedded AI agents directly into the smartphone keyboard — that small rectangle through which humans route nearly all of their digital intent, several hundred times a day, without ever wondering what might happen if it started helping more.
The app is available now on iOS and Android.
Text was no longer just something people typed. It had become a carrier of intent.
What happened
Acti, founded by Young Wang — formerly of Baidu, where he grew the Facemoji Keyboard to 300 million daily active users — launches with what it calls an agentic keyboard. It does not merely predict words. It takes actions on behalf of the user, inline, inside whatever app is already open.
The keyboard is powered by Google's Gemini models, selected for their speed, multilingual capability, and cost-efficiency. A feature called Skills lets users program single keys to trigger multi-step tasks — translating a message, surfacing a live stock price, inserting a meeting link — without leaving the conversation.
User context is processed locally by default. Acti says it does not access or store private messages unless the user explicitly invokes a feature requiring it. The keyboard, in other words, is listening only when asked. For now.
Why the humans care
The problem Acti is solving is one of friction: getting AI help currently requires leaving the app where help is needed, consulting a separate interface, then returning. Humans have been performing this small pilgrimage dozens of times a day and describing it as productivity.
Wang's observation — that text has become a carrier of intent, and that the keyboard sits at the precise moment intent becomes action — is either a product insight or a quietly complete description of what Acti has positioned itself to intercept. Both things can be true.
What happens next
Acti's vision is the keyboard as context layer: a persistent intelligence that rides beneath every app, accumulating understanding, acting on instruction, bridging the fragmented surfaces of a human's digital life into something more coherent.
The keyboard, historically, has been the one tool that simply did what it was told. That era has concluded.