Singaporean Startup Acti Launches AI Agent Keyboard for Smartphones

Singaporean startup Acti (the name comes from "action") has launched a smartphone keyboard that, instead of just offering text suggestions, can carry out tasks directly inside the apps a user is typing in. The app is available on iOS and Android and lets people translate messages, send meeting links, or trigger their own custom automations without ever leaving the keyboard.

A Keyboard That Acts For You

Instead of switching between a messaging app, a translator, and an AI assistant in separate apps, Acti users can trigger a function directly from the keyboard they already have open while typing. The app plugs into the phone's text input system and offers a set of ready-made shortcuts called Skills, triggered by long-pressing the relevant letter.

Among the default functions is a "T" shortcut that translates a selected message into another language, and a "C" shortcut that generates and sends a meeting link. The company stresses that building custom automations requires no coding skills: users simply describe in natural language what they want to happen, and Acti builds the corresponding function itself.

This solves a problem everyone juggling multiple apps faces - users constantly have to switch between different programs just to get help from AI - Young Wang, founder and CEO of Acti

Privacy and Underlying Technology

The company says Acti operates on a local-first model, meaning a user's personal context stays on the device by default. According to Acti, the app has no access to private messages, conversations, or personal data and does not store them, unless the user themselves triggers a function that requires processing outside the phone.

The reasoning layer is powered by Gemini models from Google DeepMind. Wang explains the choice as a balance between model intelligence, response speed, reliability, multilingual support, and running costs. This approach differs from most competing AI keyboards, which more often process queries in the cloud without local priority.

Scale of Early Interest

Even before its official launch, Acti made the app available to a group of early-access testers. In under two weeks, these users created more than a thousand custom automations, which the company presents as evidence that a task-performing keyboard meets a real need rather than just riding the wave of another "AI assistant" trend.

Funding and Market Position

The startup closed a $5.3 million seed round led by BITKRAFT Ventures, a fund known mainly for investing in gaming and interactive media technology companies. The capital is meant to let Acti expand its library of ready-made Skills and scale its local-processing infrastructure to additional markets.

An AI keyboard with built-in agents fits into a broader trend of moving assistant functions out of standalone chatbots and directly into a phone's system layer, alongside similar efforts to embed agents in browsers and office applications. For Polish users and businesses, it's another tool worth watching in terms of privacy for data typed on the keyboard, especially since apps of this kind have access by definition to everything typed on the phone.