11 ms·
How Swipe Typing Works
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoSwipe typing appears to substantially worse now than it was 10 years ago. In that sentence, "typing", "now" and "then" all needed correcting from the first guess, and in this one also "sentence" and "correcting". All this AI and they can't predict a word from a set of nearby keys?
- mukesh610 4y agoIt depends on which keyboard you're using. I'm using the Google keyboard and it's pretty advanced: i typed this comment with it, and only corrected the word "typed" which showed up as "tired"
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoI'm using GBoard. Suggesting "tired" there is clearly probably nonsense ("I tired of something" is not a very common expression, even if grammatical), if it had a choice between "tired" and "typed" in that context, having just typed "keyboard", only one is likely to be intended.
- cube2222 4y agoNot sure which swipe keyboard you are using, but the default iOS implementation is terrible. Google keyboard is orders if magnitude better (and handles multilingual situations much better as well).
- ryantgtg 4y agoI don’t think the iOS one is too terrible. I use it with autocorrect turned off. Predictably, it gets worse the faster I swipe, so I’ve found that it pays to slow down and be slightly more precise. It got every word in that comment correct (although I had to change “to” to “too”).
- jeffbee 4y agoBut apparently it still has that problem where "if" stands in for "of" even though a trivial evaluation of the relative probability of "orders if magnitude" and "orders of magnitude" would favor the latter. Why don't these keyboards look around a bit to select the best fit?
- Larrikin 4y agoI think all research into it is dead after trying to use AI and they don't care that it's a little broken. iOS was extremely behind Android for years by refusing to allow different keyboards, Swype closed down as a company, and Swiftkey stopped trying after Microsoft bought and integrated them. It's definitely the fastest way to type English on a phone but companies seem to have extracted all money they can get from it and don't really care about the tech anymore.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- xhevahir 4y agoThe best swipe-typing I've ever used was on my Windows phone of five or six years ago. GBoard is so-so, Apple's is terrible, and--what's really odd to my mind--SwiftKey is pretty bad, too, despite belonging to the same company behind Windows Phone.
- Moru 4y agoSwiftKey keeps telling me how many presses I'm saving by using SwiftKey. Does that count all the delete, retry, delete, retry, delete, give up, type manually-cycles I'm doing? It's slightly better than having to type by hand but it still feels like having both hands tied behind my back and typing with my nose. I can't even get through one short sentence without deleting and retrying several times on some words...
- tokamak-teapot 4y ago“Swiping seems to be substantially better now than it was ten years ago.” (Typed using swipes on iPhone) I had to correct ‘bite’ to ‘now’. I don’t use swipe typing so I haven’t practised.
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoI really do feel that even a half-cooked statistical model of English, let alone one with any awareness of grammar, would be able to figure out that "now" is far more likely after "to be substantially better" than "bite" would be.
- mackrevinack 4y agosame. these days it seems the only way i can avoid mistakes is to swipe slowly
- SeriousM 4y agoIs there any solution to pc typing? I mean on mobile there is a suggestion what word I probably want to write but on pc there is nothing like that on os level. However Google (suite) and Microsoft (365) have something like that in the products.
- aendruk 4y agoMaybe a chorded keyboard. e.g. https://openstenoproject.org/ https://openstenoproject.org/
- nvrspyx 4y agoWindows does actually have this. You have to enable it for hardware keyboards in the keyboard settings as it's only enabled for the touch keyboard by default. macOS has it enabled by default, IIRC. However, I don't think it works everywhere (at least on macOS), like some electron apps.
- user_7832 4y agoNot probably exactly what you're looking for but autohotkey can act as a typo-corrector, you can maybe search for "ahk autocorrect".
- nix0n 4y agoI don't know of anything on the OS level, but when I have to write a long document in English I use the Kate text editor, which offers autocompletion based on words you've used already in that document.
- SeriousM 4y agoVsCode is also doing that, buts quite stupid as it just offers already typed words, not a dictionary.
- nix0n 4y agoSame for Kate, but for technical documents it's actually better that way in my opinion, since your vocabulary is going to be different than what's in your spellcheck dictionary. I usually just copy/paste another document with the same topic as a starting point.
- gpspake 4y agoI got an ipad pro recently and I was shocked there's not a swipe option for typing on the standard keyboard. After using the Google keyboard every day for years, not being able to type with one finger without lifting it after every letter feels like a huge step back. I feel like this is something where old physical keyboard conventions have persisted on mobile even though we have a proven better ux now. And for anyone who disagrees, tap away - but at least give me the option.
- epmaybe 4y agoYou can change the keyboard to be the small size keyboard in the settings (something like 'one-handed use'). Hope that helps
- nvrspyx 4y agoYou can pinch the keyboard to shrink it to a floating, iPhone-like size, which allows swiping.
- arthurcolle 4y agowhatever happened to the "split keyboard" option on the iPad? I liked that, it really blows that they got rid of it.
- nvrspyx 4y agoI'm pretty sure they still have that, just pinch in the other direction (e.g. like you're zooming in on a picture instead of zooming out)
- arthurcolle 4y agoI don't think it works!
- ridaj 4y agoYou can put Gboard on your iPad
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- losingom 4y agoSwipe typing is a must for me at this point. Tapping on the individual keys is such a slow process on a touchscreen in comparison. Obviously, a real keyboard is leagues better than both, but needs must.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoI don't know what has happened with keyboards on Android, but I routinely have to re-enter a word 4-5 times because it keeps guessing wrong. Swiping as well as typing is just as bad. Maybe it's my gargantuan hands making me somehow break the mold and confusing the algorithms. It can take me 10 minutes to type a message the length of this comment because I have to go back and correct every other words several times. I don't feel it used to be this bad, and my hands haven't gotten bigger. Really weird.
- Cipater 4y agoWhich keyboard are you using?
- marginalia_nu 4y agoGBoard.
- Cipater 4y agoTry disabling "use next word suggestions" in settings.
- user_7832 4y agoSlightly off-topic, but when Swype was initially released I was absolutely blown away by how good it was. I remember swiping in the general periphery of the correct letters, and I do not know if the algorithm smoothened out the input points, used the context of previous words or both, but the keyboard was borderline reading my mind. And trust me, I tried to be as lazy as reasonably possible while swiping to get it to predict wrong words, but it was a fight I would almost always lose, albeit very happily. My question is: why does swiping now feel so much more inaccurate? As this is HN I'd be very happy if someone from Google/Microsoft (or hopefully even Nuance) could shed some light. Was it "the big players forced the small and innovate folks out and then bureaucratized it like every commerical software because the competition was killed"? Or was it something else? I find it hard to believe that the predictive text accuracy has increased at all, if not gone down, when comparing Swype to GBoard/Swiftkey. PS: Swype is/was the name of the keyboard app by Nuance, I'm not referring to swipe-typing in general in the 1st paragraph.
- nix0n 4y agoI use an old APK of Swype, because it's still the unsurpassed state of the art for swipe typing. I don't know why, either, but it's not just you.
- user_7832 4y agoDo the old APKs still work? Is there no server verification that they do? I remember trying to get the APK but there were quite a few hoops to jump through and something went wrong.
- tentacleuno 4y agoDid you try getting them off APKMirror? They're pretty good.
- user_7832 4y agoThanks, I did, and it works as well! The only issue is... well... it's not very accurate in predicting words (at least this version). It's funding* and putting other words. What version of Swype do you use?
- aasasd 4y agoIt's baffling that there are no open-source implementations of proper swipe typing, at least for Android. AnySoftKeyboard has it, but it's not nearly the same as Swype and such, and is prone to mistakes. It could use some kind of a better approach. Notably, with Swype and OKeyboard I could drag my thumb just in the vicinity of the target letters, and they tended to guess the word right, basing the guess mostly on the turns in the swipe (at least it felt that way). ASK requires me to tap the first letter precisely, and is sensitive to me hitting the subsequent ones, while the corners of the swipe aren't so useful. Using a closed-source keyboard app feels very icky. OKeyboard was fine and advertised that it's secure because it has no permission to access the network—until it suddenly added that permission in an update, without changing the app description.
- losingom 4y agoFlorisBoard is open source and has an implementation for this (en-us only for now): https://github.com/florisboard/florisboard https://github.com/florisboard/florisboard It's okay, but definitely worse than proprietary alternatives right now. But at least it's under active development.
- driminicus 4y agoAnysoftkeyboard (https://anysoftkeyboard.github.io/ https://anysoftkeyboard.github.io/) has swype as, though in beta. I currently switch back and forth between ASK and florisboard.
- aasasd 4y ago> basing the guess mostly on the turns in the swipe Btw, a consequence of Swype&company's algorithm is the bit of entertainment that you can get by dragging the thumb whatever which way over the keyboard: they still pop up some word guesses. ASK kinda tries to assemble a word from the letters you hit on the way instead (there's an explanation in the Github issues), so in the end it comes up with nothing. A more useful aspect of the behaviour is that with a turn-respecting algo, it's easy to correct its mistakes by making a small peak in the swipe trajectory on the wanted letter.
- xkfm 4y agoI'm a fan of MessageEase. Really great product and it still wows people when I use my phone in public.
- fraolt 4y agoMessagEase is a major reason why I haven't switched to a linux phone yet. I think their patents have recently expired, so maybe someone picks up the task.
- spiffytech 4y agoHas anyone else found that swipe typing works poorly on a dvorak keyboard? My guess is that because all of the vowels are clumped together it's harder to guess the swiped word.
- charcircuit 4y agoNope, for some reason I use Dvorak on mobile, but no where else.
- Vingdoloras 4y agoNintype has ruined all other swipe keyboards for me. Why nobody else has picked up on the idea of twohanded swiping the way Nintype did it is a mystery. Even now, 5+ years after last using it, I find myself wanting to type the way Nintype would let me, only to be disappointed.
- madvoid 4y agoAmen. Due to reliability and lack of updates I don't use it anymore but Nintype was by far the best mobile typing experience I've had.
- charcircuit 4y agoI hate how most swipe keyboards don't support swiping with multiple fingers at once. It's such a convenient feature that they always seem to be missing. e.g. To type "apples" you swipe from a to p with one finger, then put your other finger on l, then move your first finger to e, then move your second finger to s. While it might sound confusing having two swipes going on at the same time, it's pretty easy once you get the hang of it.
- stormbrew 4y agoI've always wondered if maybe there should be a different keyboard layout designed specifically for swipe keyboards. Qwerty and dvorak are designed around assumptions about how you type, and to different degrees both cluster letters for some level of regular proximity to frequently-adjacent keys (with qwerty throwing some wrenches in, allegedly to prevent typewriter jams). But with swipe you almost want the opposite, so that you rarely run into a situation where you move to a part of the keyboard where 2 or 3 nearby keys might be what you "really meant". But I've never seen any attempt at this, and that surprises me.
- redwood 4y agoI love swype and it has been a game-changer for my life. As has voice to text by the way. The thing I find surprise me about swype is it doesn't seem to bring it as physical understanding of context for the nearby words. Anyone else feel that way too?