[HN Gopher] How Swipe Typing Works
___________________________________________________________________
How Swipe Typing Works
Author : oplante
Score : 95 points
Date : 2022-04-08 09:31 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fleksy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fleksy.com)
| aasasd wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| FlorisBoard is open source and has an implementation for this
| (en-us only for now):
| 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 wrote:
| Anysoftkeyboard (https://anysoftkeyboard.github.io/) has
| swype as, though in beta. I currently switch back and forth
| between ASK and florisboard.
| aasasd wrote:
| > _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.
| SeriousM wrote:
| Is 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.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Not probably exactly what you're looking for but autohotkey can
| act as a typo-corrector, you can maybe search for "ahk
| autocorrect".
| nix0n wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| VsCode is also doing that, buts quite stupid as it just
| offers already typed words, not a dictionary.
| aendruk wrote:
| Maybe a chorded keyboard.
|
| e.g. https://openstenoproject.org/
| nvrspyx wrote:
| Windows 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.
| gumby wrote:
| The Mac has this built into its text widget
| gpspake wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| You can change the keyboard to be the small size keyboard in
| the settings (something like 'one-handed use'). Hope that helps
| nvrspyx wrote:
| You can pinch the keyboard to shrink it to a floating, iPhone-
| like size, which allows swiping.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| whatever happened to the "split keyboard" option on the iPad?
| I liked that, it really blows that they got rid of it.
| ridaj wrote:
| You can put Gboard on your iPad
| stormbrew wrote:
| I'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.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Slightly 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Do 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 wrote:
| Did you try getting them off APKMirror? They're pretty
| good.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Thanks, 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?
| bgro wrote:
| On a semi related note, there is some speculation out there
| that iOS 13 changed how the native iOS keyboard predicts words
| and has gotten much worse.
| edanm wrote:
| I kind of agree but kind of disagree.
|
| I find GBoard to be incredibly good, more or less as good as I
| remember Swype being. (I initially switched because GBoard
| supported Hebrew and Swype didn't, not because of accuracy, but
| didn't find it worse at least.)
|
| I find the native Apple swipe interface to be _terrible_. It
| doesn 't even come close to being as good as GBoard. And I use
| it fairly often, because if the Apple keyboard comes up I'll
| usually try to use it for 2-3 words, before getting frustrated
| and switching.
|
| I have no idea why.
| user_7832 wrote:
| That's an interesting perspective. I personally haven't found
| Apple's keyboard to be bad (it's a bit over-aggressive, but I
| don't find it incorrect very often, it just censors
| everything to a duck). But the multilingual thing is an
| important point - in my very limited testing of Hinglish
| (English+Hindi) Swype used to be very pro-Hindi, even when I
| wanted to use an English word. But I don't remember comparing
| it to GBoard then (not sure if it even supported Hinglish
| back then). Google's team has certainly put a lot of effort
| into local Indian languages from what I've seen (including
| ads if I'm not mistaken).
|
| Oddly, I find Apple's Keyboard almost completely superior to
| GBoard (the only exception being the number row option).
| However I use it on an iPad and not a phone so that may also
| be a factor.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I have good experience with Apple's keyboard for accuracy,
| but I do get frustrated routinely that it won't let me
| swear.
| edanm wrote:
| To be clear, I have to explicitly switch language. It
| doesn't do anything automatically (which makes sense since
| it's a different alphabet).
|
| But my hit rate with Gboard is staggeringly higher than
| apple keyboard. I wonder if we're using it differently,
| which is what is causing the difference in experience here.
| user_7832 wrote:
| > I wonder if we're using it differently, which is what
| is causing the difference in experience here.
|
| Yep I think this is true. I use the Apple Keyboard only
| on my iPad (my phone is android), while if I had to guess
| you use an iPhone with a much smaller screen/keyboard.
| Everyone's real life mileage varies, as the saying goes.
| MrZander wrote:
| I had the same experience. It was absolute sorcery the first
| time I used it. I was able to type without looking and would be
| confident that the result was correct. Using the Google
| keyboard now is still pretty good, but I routinely have to
| correct words.
|
| I also have two languages installed now and it will sometimes
| type a completely nonsensical sentence in the wrong language. I
| can't say for sure if this is better or worse though, I only
| knew one language back when I used Swype.
| bbarn wrote:
| Same experience here. When I used Swype a decade? ago I thought
| it was fantastic.
|
| Now it seems to cause me more time correcting it than it saves.
|
| And for some damn reason, the MS version at least (I know of no
| better multilingual swipe keyboard for iOS than that, so any
| recommendations would be great) constantly chooses the word
| "toy" instead of "you". So much so that I put a manual
| autocorrect entry in to stop it, which is of course frustrating
| anytime I'm talking about what my dog is doing or that I have
| several projects of a non-serious nature in process.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Are you using the old(er) versions of the app, or did you
| upgrade it to whatever was the latest? If you're on Android
| you could likely go back to an older version.
|
| I think GBoard supports multilingual typing on iOS as well,
| though I can't comment on how good it is.
| fsckboy wrote:
| "toy" for "you" is so irritating on ios, but here's something
| else I get, I swipe "can" and it puts in "can't", almost
| every time.
| naijaboiler wrote:
| Amen to "toy" for "you".i would imagine in conversation, for
| anyone older than 5 years old, "you" is at least 20 times
| more likely to be the intent than "toy". Why can't their
| score weighting take that into consideration
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| So it's not just me! I find myself far less accurate on Swift
| key, or other variations, than I did many years ago on Swype -
| to the point I subconsciously reverted back to poking without
| even noticing it as the swiping became so bad. And my phones
| got bigger so I'm pretty sure my actual accuracy is higher...
| bastawhiz wrote:
| I had installed Swift Key after a year or two of Swype and it
| was a marked improvement. Many years later, there were days
| where it wouldn't accurately handle a single sentence without
| error or correctly predict a single word. Updates seemed to
| clear the learned history and reset its accuracy. The
| Microsoft acquisition seemed to kill any forward movement on
| it.
|
| I switched, after much anxiety, to GBoard. It feels much like
| SK used to feel. It isn't awesome that it's a Google
| keyboard, but at least it's accurate and consistent.
| dmd wrote:
| My guess would be simply that we're all typing on phones an
| order of magnitude more than we were then, and we only notice
| when it doesn't work.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Wow, I thought it was just me!
|
| I have had a similar experience, and just wrote it off as being
| a different device or something.
| telchior wrote:
| I used Swype on release, then not for years, until picking it
| up again recently, when I found that I still loved the input
| method but made tons of errors. The lack of accuracy had me
| thinking I'd just gotten old and lost fine motor control -- I
| couldn't imagine that a single-function piece of software had
| gotten that much worse.
|
| It's an interesting difference from other software: with almost
| anything else, there's a UI that helps evaluate whether the
| software degraded. Swype doesn't have any such contextual clue.
| I'd imagine this problem will pop up a lot in the future with
| various user-assist, AI-based tech.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| > Swype doesn't have any such contextual clue.
|
| Detecting when a user deletes a word and replaces it with a
| word that was previously in the options list seems like it
| would be a fairly strong signal.
| telchior wrote:
| If you saw an update and then were immediately exposed to
| the new behavior, maybe so. But for someone who used it for
| maybe a couple years, stopped and then came back years
| later, it's extremely difficult to realize that a quiet
| feature like this is new.
|
| Contrast that with, say, any Microsoft Office product where
| coming back a few years later is like returning to a city
| you used to know and finding all the old buildings you knew
| razed to the ground and an entirely new street layout.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| I wonder if they've trained all their AI ~~novels~~ models
| ~~in~~ on people's ~~inbuilt~~ input where mistakes aren't
| corrected, reinforcing incorrect ~~Freddie's~~ ~~fuses~~
| guesses.
|
| All mistakes there were genuinely made.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Curiously, Apple's swiping on iPhone got every word of that
| right. I don't know to what degree I've individually trained
| it, though.
| arjvik wrote:
| No way they made that rookie mistake... training on your own
| predictions leads to a useless feedback loop that only
| exacerbates errors.
|
| What about a GPT-3-based autocorrect/Swype predictor?
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Yeah it would be so amazing to have a FOSS swipe typing
| keyboard. I still use Google KB for this with internet
| access limited.
|
| I tried some options but they weren't up to scratch
| especially with multi language
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| What about whatever Bayesian or Markov chain systems they
| used to use. At least they worked.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| Could also be that now our expectations are higher than they
| were back in the days?
| ktrnka wrote:
| I worked at Swype and then Nuance after the acquisition.
|
| My experience with Google keyboard has been very good. The main
| difference I've noticed over the years is that phones got
| bigger. Swype was magical on a 3 inch screen but not nearly as
| good on a 5 inch. If I remember right the core would take the
| exact touch points less seriously on a small screen but on a
| big screen usage might go back and forth between very accurate
| and sloppy.
|
| If I had to speculate somewhat, it's possible that newer
| keyboards take a very principled approach to the code for input
| recognition. I didn't work on the input matching part at Swype
| but it was often discussed with great fear, because it was a
| couple giant functions with tons of conditionals. It had been
| built up over I think a few years early on but without much
| documentation.
|
| The other thing is that there was a race to the bottom on
| price, which later led to much smaller teams working on
| keyboards. There just isn't enough financial incentive to put
| many resources towards it, compared to something like speech
| recognition.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Thank you so much for your comment! (I indeed am continually
| impressed by HackerNews's capabilities in this regard.)
|
| > If I remember right the core would take the exact touch
| points less seriously on a small screen but on a big screen
| usage might go back and forth between very accurate and
| sloppy.
|
| Do you mean that the points taken would fluctuate between
| more and less accurately/precise only the screens, or was the
| point selection consistent but the results poor?
|
| Re: your guess about principled approach, that's kinda funny
| and ironic how a poorly-written bunch of code can be better
| than something very precise.
|
| > The other thing is that there was a race to the bottom on
| price
|
| Slightly ignorant as a customer but iirc while Swype had a
| paid option it also had a free option like the competition
| then (and now). Would this imply that Keyboard companies need
| external funding/or be bought over by MS etc?
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Swipe 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?
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| I 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.
| Larrikin wrote:
| I 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]
| xhevahir wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| SwiftKey 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...
| mackrevinack wrote:
| same. these days it seems the only way i can avoid mistakes is
| to swipe slowly
| mukesh610 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| Not 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).
| jeffbee wrote:
| But 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?
| ryantgtg wrote:
| I 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").
| xkfm wrote:
| I'm a fan of MessageEase. Really great product and it still wows
| people when I use my phone in public.
| fraolt wrote:
| MessagEase 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.
| [deleted]
| charcircuit wrote:
| I 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.
| Vingdoloras wrote:
| Nintype 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.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I 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.
| spiffytech wrote:
| Has 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 wrote:
| Nope, for some reason I use Dvorak on mobile, but no where
| else.
| losingom wrote:
| Swipe 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-04-10 23:01 UTC)