Acti Review (2026): Pricing, Features & Honest Verdict

Acti is an AI keyboard for iOS and Android that turns any text field into a command line for AI actions. Instead of just predicting words, it runs skills, translates, pulls data, and builds mini-apps without leaving the app you are in. Best for power users and tinkerers who live on their phones. Price: free right now, paid tiers coming. Rating: 7/10.

What is Acti?

Acti is an agentic keyboard built by OpenActi, a Singapore startup that launched it on July 1, 2026 and landed near the top of Product Hunt that day. The team is not new to this space. Founder and CEO Young Wang spent a decade at Baidu scaling the Facemoji keyboard past 300 million daily active users, and the company just closed a $5.3 million seed round led by BITKRAFT Ventures. So this is people who have shipped keyboards at massive scale taking a swing at what a keyboard becomes in the AI era.

The core idea is that your keyboard is the one app you use inside every other app, so it is the natural place to put an execution layer. Acti runs on Google’s Gemini models and lets you trigger actions straight from the text field: translate a message, generate a meeting link, pull NBA stats, draft a reply, or fire off a custom skill you built yourself. It works in email, chat, social apps, anywhere you type. The pitch is speed-of-thought execution without app switching, and for once that framing actually fits the product.

What are Acti’s key features?

ActiBar, the spacebar that does more

Acti replaces the standard spacebar with something it calls the ActiBar. Tap it normally to type a space. Hold it to trigger an AI action on whatever you are writing. It is a smart bit of design, because it puts the AI trigger on the one key everybody already hits constantly, so there is nothing new to learn about where to reach.

Skill Keys you can map yourself

You can assign an action to any key by long-pressing it. Hold “T” to translate, hold “C” to drop in a meeting link, and so on. The keys can link to third-party APIs, so a Skill Key can do real work rather than just insert canned text. This is where power users will spend their time, and it is the feature that separates Acti from an AI-flavored autocomplete.

Skill Builder and a community marketplace

You build custom skills by describing what you want in plain language, no code required, then keep them private or publish them. In early access the community built over 1,000 skills in two weeks, which is a strong early signal that the marketplace loop works. A keyboard with a healthy skill marketplace is a very different thing from a keyboard with a fixed feature list.

Over 100 built-in integrations

Acti ships with connections to Notion, Gmail, Calendly, weather data, sports stats, the Twitter API, and more, and it can generate small interactive mini-apps to share inside a chat. The breadth here is what makes the command-line framing believable. The more services it can reach, the more the keyboard becomes a place you get things done instead of a place you type.

How much does Acti cost?

Acti is free to download and free to use as of launch, on both iOS and Android, with no paid tiers announced yet. OpenActi has said subscriptions are coming for advanced AI models, higher daily usage limits, and premium features, but there are no prices, plan names, or limits published today. So the honest answer is: it costs nothing right now, and you should expect a paywall on the heavier features later.

That makes a clean price comparison impossible, because the real competitors are free too. Gboard and SwiftKey do not cost anything, and Acti is competing on capability rather than price for now. The thing to watch is where the eventual paywall lands. If core actions stay free and only high-volume or premium-model usage costs money, Acti stays attractive. If day-to-day skills get gated behind a subscription, the calculus changes. Until they publish real pricing, treat the current free ride as temporary.

Who is Acti best for?

Use Acti if you live on your phone and you are the kind of person who sets up shortcuts, automations, and custom workflows for fun. Creators, developers, and power users will get the most out of Skill Keys and the Skill Builder, because the whole value is in configuring it to your own routines. If you already lean on tools like Shortcuts or text-expansion apps, this will click immediately.

Skip Acti, at least for now, if you just want a keyboard that types accurately and stays out of the way. It is a young product from a young company, it leans on cloud AI for the interesting stuff, and the monetization is undefined. If you are privacy-cautious, note that while Acti says personal context stays on-device by default, the agentic actions do send data out to work. Casual users are better served by a mature, boring keyboard until Acti settles.

Best Acti alternatives

Gboard is Google’s keyboard and the default for most Android users. It has excellent typing, glide input, voice, and tight Google integration, and it is free. What it does not have is agentic task execution or a skill marketplace. If you want reliable typing over automation, Gboard is the safe pick.

Microsoft SwiftKey is the best-in-class swipe keyboard and it added Copilot AI features in early 2026. It is great at prediction and personalization, and it is free. But its AI is assistant-flavored rather than a programmable action layer, so it does not give you the custom-skill depth Acti is going for.

Facemoji is the emoji-and-expression keyboard, and notably it is the product Acti’s founder scaled at Baidu. It is built around customization and expressive communication, not task automation. If you want personality and stickers rather than an execution engine, Facemoji covers that lane.

Final verdict: Is Acti worth it?

Acti is the rare “AI keyboard” that has a real reason to exist. Putting an execution layer on the spacebar, letting people build skills in plain language, and seeding a marketplace that filled up in two weeks is a smart, coherent product built by a team that has shipped keyboards to hundreds of millions of people. For tinkerers and power users, it is easily worth installing today, especially while it is free.

The reasons to hold back are all about maturity, not vision. The pricing is undefined, the interesting features depend on cloud AI, and the whole thing is two weeks old in public. None of that is disqualifying, but it means Acti is a “try it and see” rather than a “switch your daily driver” recommendation. Install it as a second keyboard, build a few skills, and decide for yourself before you rely on it. The upside is high enough that it is worth the ten minutes.