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"
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.
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”).
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Same 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
At the time of posting, I didn't use any version, but I use APKMirror on a regular basis. I currently have the Swype+Dragon Trial on my telephone to try it out, though.
I still use Swype as well. I'd installed it from the Play store prior to it being discontinued.
It still works fine, but hasn't had any updates in 2 years. I've also noticed that if I open the Play store link (below) in incognito mode, it says "not found", but if I'm logged into my Google account, it brings up the app's info.
I've tried switching to Gboard a number of times, but its swipe typing is way less accurate. Swype also has a bunch of gestures that are very convenient, like one to toggle the current word between UPPER, lower, and Title case, if you swipe from apostrophe to s, it'll insert "'s", and it's trivially easy to add new words to its dictionary. Overall, I'm not looking forward to when I eventually have to give up using Swype.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I 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?
81 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadIn 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?
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.
Google keyboard is orders if magnitude better (and handles multilingual situations much better as well).
It got every word in that comment correct (although I had to change “to” to “too”).
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.
I had to correct ‘bite’ to ‘now’.
I don’t use swipe typing so I haven’t practised.
e.g. https://openstenoproject.org/
However, I don't think it works everywhere (at least on macOS), like some electron apps.
Obviously, a real keyboard is leagues better than both, but needs must.
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.
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.
It still works fine, but hasn't had any updates in 2 years. I've also noticed that if I open the Play store link (below) in incognito mode, it says "not found", but if I'm logged into my Google account, it brings up the app's info.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nuance.swy...
I've tried switching to Gboard a number of times, but its swipe typing is way less accurate. Swype also has a bunch of gestures that are very convenient, like one to toggle the current word between UPPER, lower, and Title case, if you swipe from apostrophe to s, it'll insert "'s", and it's trivially easy to add new words to its dictionary. Overall, I'm not looking forward to when I eventually have to give up using Swype.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think GBoard supports multilingual typing on iOS as well, though I can't comment on how good it is.
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.
All mistakes there were genuinely made.
What about a GPT-3-based autocorrect/Swype predictor?
I tried some options but they weren't up to scratch especially with multi language
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
I have had a similar experience, and just wrote it off as being a different device or something.
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.
It's okay, but definitely worse than proprietary alternatives right now. But at least it's under active development.
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.
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.
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.