Everything happens on your device. Nothing you type is sent anywhere — the page downloads what it needs once, so it keeps working offline.
The keyboard's own engine, on your device
The box runs the same engine the Ezra keyboard for Windows uses, so what you type here is exactly what the keyboard would type.
Nothing you type leaves your device. The page makes no request once it has loaded, which is also why it keeps working with the network off.
One consonant, seven vowels
The box opens on slame dhena nhe — ሰላም ደህና ነህ, “hello, are you well”. Those are the keys, not the spelling. A consonant on its own is the first order; the sixth takes e. So slame gives ሰላም.
Spell it the way the Latin looks and you get the other letters. selam gives ስላመ — the same three consonants, each in the order the other one wanted.
The vowel that follows a consonant rewrites it rather than adding to it. Pick a consonant and read across — then tap a form to type it.
A converter, and an engine
There are two ways to turn Latin into Amharic. One converts the finished text: it takes the whole word, applies rules or a lookup, and hands back a result. The other is a keyboard engine — it reads one keystroke at a time and keeps the state between them, so a vowel key does not add a letter, it reshapes the letter already on the screen.
The difference is the two spellings above. The same three consonants, the same letters — only the order changed. A converter reading the finished string has no reason to tell those apart. An engine does, because it watched them arrive in an order.
This matters because the box is not a demonstration of transliteration. It is the keyboard's own engine, built to run in a browser — so what it commits here is what it would commit in a document, and when the Windows keyboard is released, nothing about the way you type changes.
Punctuation
The marks come across too. Amharic traditionally divides words with ፡ rather than a space, and ends a sentence with the four-dot ።.
- ፠./
- ፡:
- ።.
- ፣,,
- ፤;
- ፥,
- ፦:-
- ፧:.
- ፨::
How this page works
The reverse direction is a different thing. A keyboard only goes one way, so Amharic to Latin is that same key table read backwards, and where a character has more than one key it names the shortest. It tells you keystrokes that would produce the text, which is true; it cannot tell you what someone originally typed, and does not claim to.
The full syllabary, including the letters this page does not show, is on the fidel chart.
This page types the way Ezra does. The keyboard brings the same keystrokes to wherever Windows lets you type. It is not released yet, and it will be free when it is.