ASCII Transliteration — Typing Non-ASCII Text

Android ✅ Supported iOS ✖ Not supported

adb shell input text is ASCII-only — a single non-ASCII character makes the whole command fail and leaves the field blank. When the agent types text on Android, Ghost now transliterates it to the closest ASCII first, so type_text degrades to something usable instead of silently typing nothing.

Typed (transliterated non-ASCII): 'Sauté' -> 'Saute'

Transliteration is NFKD normalization with combining marks dropped:

Input	Typed
Sauté	Saute
café	cafe
Zürich	Zurich
日本語	(dropped)
café 😀	cafe

Characters with no ASCII base (CJK, emoji) are dropped rather than erroring. Pure-ASCII text is passed through untouched (fast path).

When it applies

This is the graceful fallback for the plain input text path — Android type_text only. There’s no config and no kill-switch; it’s always on.

For full-fidelity emoji / CJK, use type_unicode (ADBKeyboard broadcast), which is unchanged. iOS has its own text-entry path and is unaffected.

Related

• MCP Server — type_text vs type_unicode