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Fleksy - Awesome new predictive text input method

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Re: Fleksy - Awesome new predictive text input method

#101

Post by bedroomfireflys »

ricardobeat wrote: post #77
jenius wrote: post #36

Can anyone explain how this works? Seems like total black magic to me... the dude is typing random gibberish and it still figures out the word? Then he's just tapping randomly on the screen, gibberish comes out, then turns into the word he wanted? Don't mean this to sound unintelligent, the video was just crazy. What kind of key proximity algorithms are behind this?

This works in a similar way to BlindType (acquired by Google) from a couple years back: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9b8NlMd79w edit: it's actually the same! http://phandroid.com/2012/08/16/makers-of-blindtype-bring-us...

haha! I was just about to say how this reminded me of BlindType! When do you think Google will integrate BT into Android?

Re: Fleksy - Awesome new predictive text input method

#102

Post by oulipo »

p4bl0 wrote: post #86
oulipo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer to type with the 8pen.com

This is so thinking-outside-the-box! I'm amazed with that technology. Thanks for sharing it here. If this takes of (it probably should, but I don't know if it will), imagine people in a few years being able to write and read directly with the kind of the symbols that appear at 4:45 in the "Idea"[1] video! [1] http://www.8pen.com/watch?v=1

I'm willing to bet that in a couple years all the kids will be writing with the 8pen...

Re: Fleksy - Awesome new predictive text input method

#103

Post by sean-duffy »

Certainly looks faster than typing on a standard touch keypad, but this makes me really not look forward to my next phone. For the last couple of years I've had a Blackberry and I've become used to being able to send out paragraph-long text very quickly and efficiently. But of course a Blackberry Curve leaves a lot to be desired in terms of the functionality of a modern smartphone. So I want a better phone, but I'm just regretful of the fact that it's going to end up being some kind of iOS or Andriod fully-touch, because I know my efficiency will go straight down.

Re: Fleksy - Awesome new predictive text input method

#104

Post by baby »

mtrimpe wrote: post #46
baby wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see this improving my keyboard speed on a desktop since I notice an error after typing two other words (I type really really fast).

These systems usually use predictions (see Markov chains) based on your previous input to automatically catch and correct those small typos and prevent you from needing to skip two words back to fix the typo. In the case of a false positive (correction where none was needed) you can just delete the entire word and type again. As this is usually done using Markov chains which learn from your previous input this could…

in the case of a false positive you have to go back two words and correct it (in the idea the word was corrected automaticaly). I'm afraid this happens more than I make mistakes typing.

Re: Fleksy - Awesome new predictive text input method

#105

Post by mhartl »

novaleaf wrote: post #91

i don't get it. how is this different from Swype? or is Swype not available on iOS?

It's different in that Swype uses one continuous motion instead of discrete taps. (There are undoubtedly other differences as well.) And no, Swype isn't available on iOS. (N.B. I use Swype on Android and love it.)

Re: Fleksy - Awesome new predictive text input method

#106

Post by bitsoda »

I tried this out just now. While the tech is very impressive and I could see why this is a great keyboard for the blind, I've honed my iOS tapping to a point where the stock keyboard is a bit faster. What slows me down is the swiping for space. Hitting the spacebar is much quicker in my experience. Still, very cool app.

Re: Fleksy - Awesome new predictive text input method

#107

Post by jenius »

samstokes wrote: post #82
jeremyarussell wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patent pending kind? I doubt they are sharing it quite yet but the one beauty of patents is we'll get the entire answer once the patent isn't pending anymore. If I had to imagine though, the algorithm is just accounting for the most likely word to follow the previous wording, that could have been formed by hitting keys that were next to the ones you really hit wrong. I'd like to see how it handles my wanton throwing…

This is pretty much how the stock Android keyboard works. It's been able to spot missed keys since at least Ice Cream Sandwich - e.g. I just typed "kettrt" and it's suggesting "letter" as a correction. Since Jelly Bean it's also had some bigram support too (guesses the next word based on the previous without you typing anything). Aside from the "typing without a keyboard" part, it's not obvious from the video how Fle…

ah, i forgot about bigrams - that's a really great idea. I wonder if it's packing a huge machine learning library though... wouldn't that take a ton of space? I saw in another comment that it takes a while to start up - maybe that's why

Re: Fleksy - Awesome new predictive text input method

#108

Post by jenius »

rm999 wrote: post #68
jere wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>that could have been formed by hitting keys that were next to the ones you really hit wrong. Google does this already and I would assume they aren't the only ones. I once accidentally typed "cinnabd oatterb" into Google, yet it knew I wanted "Command Pattern". Still works today.

The Levenshtein distance, the standard metric for determining how different words are from each other, can easily be modified to change the penalty for different letter replacements. For example, you can say that the penalty for substituting an 'a' for 's' is 1, and 'a' for 'p' is 10 (or whatever).

Boom, there we go - that's the term I was looking for. Awesome!
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