What happened
Acti, based in Singapore, launched an agentic keyboard for iOS and Android on June 30. Rather than only predicting text, it can take actions across email, messaging and social apps, powered by Google's Gemini models with a local-first, privacy-preserving architecture.
Its 'Skills' feature lets users assign a single key to trigger multi-step tasks described in plain language, and a shareable marketplace lets people distribute those Skills. Testers built more than 1,000 Skills before launch. Founder Young Wang previously grew Baidu's Facemoji Keyboard past 300 million daily active users. The company disclosed a $5.3 million seed round led by BITKRAFT Ventures.
Why it matters
The keyboard is one of the few surfaces present in nearly every app, which makes it a natural place to inject actions rather than just text. Programmable, shareable Skills turn routine sequences into single keystrokes.
A local-first design addresses the obvious privacy concern of routing everything typed through an AI. That is a meaningful distinction for a tool that sees so much sensitive input.
MintedBrain take
The keyboard-as-agent surface is clever, but adoption hinges on trust in what those Skills actually do with your text. Start with low-stakes automations before wiring a single key to anything that sends on your behalf.
Discussion
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