Having a conversation in Bangla or any other language that is your native tongue brings a completely different tone to the conversation. There is certain warmth when people converse in a language that they have grown with. The language that they can relate to the very first memories they have. It is that familiarity that makes you and others feel at home when they converse in their native languages.
Coming back to Bangla, it has a similar effect. Sadly I am someone who never got the hang of writing in Bengali in spite of complete fluency in speaking it. But being out of my town for work I do crave talking in the language. The problem is the majority of online conversations that I have switched from calls to texts. Same goes for conversations I have with my old friends whom I can actually converse in Bengali. This was a problem for me because I got completely distanced from the language I grew up knowing. I had conversations with my parents in Bengali once in a while, but when you are in a city away from your family and loved ones you want to hold on to everything you can. Language is one such thing for me.
This is the reason I started trying out different Indic Keyboard apps like GBoard and Ginger but since I couldn’t really write Bangla typing in it was never easy. And many of the Indic Keyboard apps I used in spite of having text to voice feature never provided an easy understanding of the intent. So I tried special Bengali Typing Keyboard available on play store. Some were good. Fortunately, about 6 months ago I stumbled upon this Bengali Keyboard For Android users that I really like. I have used it the longest. Some updates did have some bugs but they keep changing for the better.
There were a lot of things that made it stand out which we will discuss later but it amazing text to voice translation is the sweet spot that and deciding factor. So if you are someone like me who can’t type that well in Bengali than this is the perfect app to have a seamless Bengali typing experience. Even a lot of my friends have asked me the reason behind my enhanced typing skills. Since they were so interested I thought all the Bengali speaking people on the internet might be too. So I wrote in detail about this one app.
Firstly let us discuss how this app personalises your conversations. If you are someone who uses those Bengali sticker Apps that give you Bengali content to share on chatting apps such as WhatsApp than this is the keyboard you should be using. This Bengali typing keyboard removes the need for those stickers apps with its huge sticker and GIF library. And these are not just any stickers. This keyboard app has a bunch of sticker template and with its animated avatar feature, it allows you to add your head onto its sticker templates. You can make your animated avatar by clicking a selfie or selecting any of your previous selfies and upload it to the app. The app also keeps up with the trends, so they keep on adding new sticker packs. You can make these stickers even more personalised by adding Bengali text to it. Just type the thing you want to say and you will get related stickers with that text on them. This feature is amazingly helpful for festival greetings or sharing trendy meme-like content. The app also has a really good sticker suggestion algorithm which makes the whole sticker sharing procedure even better.
But it is not just stickers if you want you can make use of other content in-app like Jokes, Shayaris, and Quotes. If you are an admin of many WhatsApp groups and want to keep the members entertained than this feature will come in really handy.
But other than just personalizing chats, it also gives you the option to personalize the app itself. You can use its theme feature to select beautiful themes for the keyboard. The app comes with a variety of themes but if you want you can select any picture from your phone to set as your keyboard’s theme.
Other than that there are many small features that give you more control of the app. You can choose the height of the keyboard or remove the border of keys on the keyboard. You can also choose the vibration level using a slider. One of my favourite features that I haven’t seen in other Bengali Keyboard Apps is that it allows you to choose the well of spell check you want from the keyboard.
Now lets come to the real keyboard features. I love the auto-suggest functionality for both Bangla and English. Which reminds me that since we do not talk to everyone in Bangla, you can switch to English keyboard with just a simple tap. Just click on the button on the left of the spacebar to switch the letters on the keyboard.
Overall I found this Bangla keyboard app to be more fun than I expected and it would be a great addition to your phone
