Thumb-Key

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Thumb-Key is a privacy-conscious smart keyboard, made specifically for your thumbs.

It features a 3x3 grid layout, as many older phones had, and uses swipes for the less common letters. Initial testing shows that you can reach ~25 words per minute after a day of use.

Instead of relying on profit-driven, privacy-offending word and sentence prediction for accuracy, as do most popular phone keyboards like Gboard and Swiftkey, Thumb-Key uses large keys with predictable positions, to prevent your eyes from hunting and pecking for letters.

As the key positions get ingrained into your muscle memory, eventually you'll be able to appromixate the fast speeds of touch-typing, your eyes never having to leave the text edit area.

This project is a follow-up to the now unmaintained (and closed-source) MessageEase Keyboard, which is its main inspiration.

founded 2 years ago

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Programming help wanted: AI-determined letter positions. (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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On desktop, I use the AI-designed Halmak Keyboard, and its had great results.

Rather than manually picking letter positions, Halmak was designed by an evolutionary algorithm, based on a given set of criteria, and sample text.

I designed the original english thumb-key layout manually, with trial-and-error, and based essentially on 3 criteria:

Letter frequency
Alternating thumbs
Thumbs come from the bottom corners, so lower and edge tiles are easier than higher.

But I did not take into account things like digrams / trigrams, and I don't know enough about evolutionary algorithms to do it.

Would anyone be interested in tackling this problem?

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Oh it looks like MessagEase has. I should've looked at their paper first.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

MessageEase unfortunately didn't do any optimization after their first 9 letters ( and I don't fully trust what they did there either ). When it came to the swipes, they based it off of whether the letter was curly-shaped or not (curly shaped letters go off the center key)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

@Dessalines where did this end up? I have experience with genetic / evolutionary and similarly applicable optimization algorithms and would be interested in helping to optimize the layout.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

We could definitely still use some help. Check the github issue, but dev has stalled on it.