My biggest gripe with smart keyboards is that it doesn't work well for multiple languages.
I speak three that uses the english alphabet, and the keyboards get annoying when it starts predicting english words when I'm typing something in a different language altogether.
Most of the time I even disable the dictionary on normal keyboards.
I came here to say the same thing. I have friends I text in a mixture of English and Portuguese, and just my simple iPhone keyboard drives me nuts. I don't want to have to cycle through the language button on every other word.
And I think that's the experience for a lot of people who live in a foreign country, or still have friends from other countries. Languages get mixed all the time.
My cofounder (spaky here) seems to be comment-limited on HN, but here are his thoughts on this:
I completely agree. I speak two languages regularly (English/French) and I also find it to be a pain point.
It's something that I hope we can address over time with Minuum. Certainly the first step will be making it really fast and painless to switch languages.
We've also considered having a quick way to disable auto-correction/disambiguation on the fly.
Do you have a favoured solution? Sounds like maybe simultaneous language support doesn't quite cut it for you.
I find the exact opposite problem on my old WinPhone - since I'm Canadian, I automatically must need the language-switcher button on my keyboard so that I can switch to french. And unlike the letter-keys, there is no autocorrect for this status-toggle. So I accidentally hit the "ENU/FRC" toggle when I meant to hit N and suddenly the autocorrect is turning my words into French.
I haven't written or typed a word of French since high-school.
They all allow to mix multiple languages and are pretty awesome virtual keyboards. Using them with two or more languages at the same time is a very smooth experience. Couldn't imagine to go back to a single language keyboard.
A quick overview:
- Swiftkey has probably the best prediction capabilities and with its cloud sync it has many advanced features.
- Touchpad is very close to swiftkey
- Kii is the keyboard with the most configuration possibilities. You can change really everything with this keyboard, from the size of the buttons
over padding, click sounds, prediction behaviors to gestures and many, many more. It's definitely the most powerful and fastest keyboard. On par with swiftkey except the cloud sync feature. Once you you set it up to your needs your type as fast as with a blackberry either with one hand (by swiping) or with two hands (by tapping). But again swiftkey and touchpad are very powerful too and at the end it's a matter of taste.
Swype is still quite popular but doesn't have good multi language support and the experience is not that smooth compared to the other ones.
I run Danish, English and Spanish on Swifthkey, and it works very well. As soon as I have typed one or two words, it knows exactly what language I'm typing.
Swype is getting better at this, you can type in English + [language of your choice]. Predictably, its guess become less precise because now it has to choose from a data set twice as large, but one can swap between setups...
Well android's default keyboard learns it pretty well. Not only does it learn words, but also their usage by observing patterns in sentences. One time i had to type a fb comment 3 times because the sending kept failing . On the third time, the keyboard was predicting entire words of the sentence, sometimes even before i wrote a single letter!
"Incidentally, this is also why the Dvorak keyboard layout is exactly the opposite of what you want in a highly ambiguous scenario; Dvorak places all the vowels adjacent to each other, significantly increasing ambiguity. Intuitively it rearranges word-space to put many common words right next to each other."
I suspected as much when it came to Swype; it's nice to see someone who has actually done the work verify this intuition. I use Dvorak on my physical keyboards, but I find it sort of... ironic, for lack of a better word... that the suboptimality of QWERTY is itself the key to how these alternate sloppy-keyboards work. It's sort of nice that my QWERTY skills don't entirely go to waste...
I think a big part of the appeal of Dvorak in the dev community is that there's something very satisfying about a keyboard based on real research. That research was done for 10 finger full-size keyboards though, and doesn't really map to the current generation of keyboards. As I allude to in that footnote, we've actually done some really cool research into optimal keyboard layouts in ambiguous scenarios. We'll probably do a follow up post diving into that! (also stay tuned, there should be a paper coming out soon).
It makes a certain amount of sense, when you think about where QWERTY came from - the problem has changed, but the solution is the same - to spread out the most common letters as much as possible in the uh... register thing where the hammers lived (don't know the technical term).
The "visualize some words" graph is awesome; took me a minute to realize it was interactive. I'd be interested in another post about how Minuum incorporates personal typing habits over time.
The video of this working on the smartwatch is crazy. I've always wondered how smart watches would deal with text input, looks like there's finally a solution. Is it possible to run this on the Pebble or Samsung watches right now?
Author here: That video is an in-house demo of an early prototype on a Samsung Galaxy Gear, so yes it works on those! Minuum isn't yet shipping on any smart watches, but we're hoping to have something out as soon as possible.
Why does a keyboard need permissions that include:
1) Network communication (full network access)
2) Your social information (read your contacts)
?
The first makes it sound like it's a keylogger, and stops me in my tracks.
The second... just why on Earth would a keyboard need to have a list of contacts? Are you going to spam my friends?
If #2 was asked for without #1, I could charitably hope that the contacts are just used for word suggestions based on names and addresses. But due to #2 being asked for in addition to #1 I really just think this is a spam machine at best, and a leaking of private contacts at worse.
Is anyone from Minuum on here who can explain why those permissions would be required.
I asked the very same question about #1 on the Play store, and the developers did respond quite quickly: the network access is required to download new language packs. This makes perfect sense to me, as much as I'd like to see something like keyboards split off into two apps: the keyboard, with no/minimal permissions; and the 'helper' app, for settings, dictionary building/importing, downloading language packs, etc.
As far as reading my social information, I have no idea why it requests that. However, upon checking XPrivacy, I can see that it has never even attempted to access accounts, contacts, SMS/MMS, etc. Which would lead me to speculate that this is either a mechanism for recommendations, or used to build up dictionaries. (Edit: I never have the keyboard build up dictionaries, so I never told Minuum to try to do anything along those lines.)
I emailed them just in case they didn't see the above, and their response is:
We require network access in order to collect analytics on how the
keyboard is used. This information is completely user anonymous
and we only use it so we can improve the experience for our users.
We request social contact information so that the app can import the
names of your contacts into our dictionary locally on your phone.
This information does not leave your phone.
We think it is of utmost importance to respect the privacy of our
users and only request certain information to improve the user
experience. For further information about privacy, please see:
http://minuum.com/data/
Please let us know if you have anymore questions,
I use Minuum and have Swiftkey, although I have to say I never liked it as much as swype or the google keyboard. I used to use Fleksy full-time because it just seemed way more responsive that Swiftkey and the gesture typing is pretty awesome. The two biggest pros for me are as follows:
1 - Small keyboard makes it hard to look at the keyboard itself as you type forcing me to actually touch type on my phone. This has allowed me to catch way more typos as I write and has also helped my writing as I can focus more on the flow of the words than on the act of typing.
2 - Screen real estate. I know that phone screens are huge, but if you want to write something longer being able to read more of what you have written without having to constantly stop and scroll is great. Responding to emails and incorporating details from prior messages is much, much easier.
Cons:
1 - I find the space gesture to sometimes result in the backspace gesture being selected if I go too quick. Compared to the speed and effortlessness of fleksy this is much more finicky.
2 - The swipe up/down to pick different word corrections from fleksy is not present meaning that choosing a different word completion requires you to leave the "home row" and click on a small target. Way less convenient.
3 - The swiftkey style "start typing and just select completions to finish the sentence" style doesn't really exist, but most of my sentences weren't as canned so I didn't really use this feature.
In summary, I use minuum and like it a lot. At most you've lost like 4-5 bucks or something or like 1/2 of a footlong sub. So you really can't go wrong by just trying it out. I would also recommend fleksy if you don't like minuum as I find both to be better than swiftkey. If minuum could grab some of the fleksy features I mentioned above it would be unstoppable.
I went from using SwiftKey to Minuum. I would say SwiftKey has better prediction, at least for predicting the next word. Minuum isn't very good right now at predicting the next word you want to type based on the previous words, though I think it has been improving. However, I think on average I probably type at about the same speed on both because Minuum allows you to be much sloppier and there is only 1 dimension.
Overall, the only real advantage of Minuum currently is its smaller size which allows you to see more of the screen... which is point. SwiftKey has more languages and currently allows for faster switching between 3 of them. And since its been around for longer is probably slightly more polished (less weird behavior when encountering weird input fields).
Oh, the other thing about Minuum is that people who haven't used it might have trouble borrowing your phone :P
I tried. Swiftkey is very resilient to errors, so I just swipe the finger over keyboard quite vaguely and know it will cope somehow, I have to be much more precise for minuum. Guess that's because of one lost dimension. Also, my phone is huge (htc one) and it feels unstable when hold it low enough to type where a spacebar used to be.
They're both predictive typing, so they both fall on their face when it comes to two things. Proper nouns and slang.
Whenever I try to write one of those two thing (often, think email addresses, friends names , "yo", etc) I have to fall back on regular input.
With swiftkey, this means just going back to pecking. With minuum, it means going into a menu and switching to minuum's full sized view or long pressing each region to get a zoomed in view of the keys around there to pick out the one I want.
The compactness of minuum is great, though. And when I'm entering non-proper nouns it's as fast as any keyboard (given a few days to adjust).
I paticuraly like the "swipe left for space" function.
It makes me want to try even more radical keyboards. Maybe something chord based.
I wonder if typing on watches will be someday as normal as typing on phones. I would rather bet on speech recognition.
Off-topic, but I'm hoping one day programming won't be a desk job. You'll get to walk around, interact with a touch screen and just have a conversation with the computer about what should your program do.
I agree! I love the thought processes of programming, but I hate staring at a glowing rectangle 2 feet ahead of me to actually synthesize those thoughts. My blue-sky hope for wearables is that they get me up, moving around, and interacting with reality while also producing great code.
For input touch screens aren't as fun or nice as mechanical buttons. Even perfect speech recognition wouldn't be what you want in a noisy environment, for texting privately, or for eyes free operation. So take a look at this http://blog.russnelson.com/chordite/index.willison Proves my argument is correct :) Okay, so maybe the hinges aren't super sexy.
Okay, I'm typing on Minuum right now. It's extremely accurate but I feel slow. You sort of have to shut your brain off and pretend you're playing a letter hunting arcade game.
It seems like I miss the space bar about five percent of the time.
To the developers, nice job and thanks for putting it on sale in the Play store.
Shame about the spacing issue, out of curiosity, how large is your device?
We actually prefer to use the right slide gesture for a space, the added bonus being that then you can disable the space bar in the settings and save even more screen space.
After you've used it for a few days, I'd love to get your impressions. You can get in touch with me at [email protected] if you're interested in sending any thoughts.
I tried it out as an exercise, just imagining a vague area of my desk as the single row of keys. It took a minute, but I was quickly able to shut off the "Y axis" part of my touch typing skills. Obviously, I wasn't actually testing on the real software, but I suspect I would be able to achieve reasonably good accuracy and speed.
"Dasher is an input method and computer accessibility tool which enables users to write without using a keyboard, by entering text on a screen using a pointing device such as a mouse, a touchpad, a touch screen, a roller ball, a joystick, a Push-button, a Wii Remote, or even mice operated by the foot or head."
Hard to tell how much success it ever had in terms of adoption, although I could imagine there may be users out there who find it invaluable. Certainly worth a look though as it gives a very nice visualisation of the text prediction algorithm as it goes.
I just got this and tried it out.... awesome. recommend it. My friend and I watched the amusing video and i said, what's 2 bucks. It is just as fast as normal typing but gives me more real estate to see the convo!
also: took me all of 5 seconds to get fluent at it. no joke.
Hey, that's great to hear, we'd love to get feedback from you after you've had a chance to use it for a few days. My email's in my profile, drop me a message in a few days!
In addition to popular SwiftKey and Swype, it's great to see all these new experimental keyboards coming out. Between KALQ for speed and Minuum for saving screen real estate, there are so many great options to choose from on the Android platform.
When do you think we'll get to the point where the blog header will link to the actual product. I know there's a lil button up there in the corner but I intuitively just click that header.
It would have been interesting to see how well this would work with that canonical phone that was going to have the side-scroll sensor in the side of the phone, completely off the screen.
Basically the way Dvorak is optimized is sub-optimal for the Minuum disambiguation engine and so it reduces the accuracy. It turns out you're much better off with QWERTY or better yet something specifically optimized for Minuum.
[+] [-] yelnatz|12 years ago|reply
I speak three that uses the english alphabet, and the keyboards get annoying when it starts predicting english words when I'm typing something in a different language altogether.
Most of the time I even disable the dictionary on normal keyboards.
[+] [-] crazygringo|12 years ago|reply
And I think that's the experience for a lot of people who live in a foreign country, or still have friends from other countries. Languages get mixed all the time.
[+] [-] wxs|12 years ago|reply
I completely agree. I speak two languages regularly (English/French) and I also find it to be a pain point.
It's something that I hope we can address over time with Minuum. Certainly the first step will be making it really fast and painless to switch languages.
We've also considered having a quick way to disable auto-correction/disambiguation on the fly.
Do you have a favoured solution? Sounds like maybe simultaneous language support doesn't quite cut it for you.
[+] [-] Pxtl|12 years ago|reply
I haven't written or typed a word of French since high-school.
[+] [-] apunic|12 years ago|reply
They all allow to mix multiple languages and are pretty awesome virtual keyboards. Using them with two or more languages at the same time is a very smooth experience. Couldn't imagine to go back to a single language keyboard.
A quick overview:
- Swiftkey has probably the best prediction capabilities and with its cloud sync it has many advanced features.
- Touchpad is very close to swiftkey
- Kii is the keyboard with the most configuration possibilities. You can change really everything with this keyboard, from the size of the buttons over padding, click sounds, prediction behaviors to gestures and many, many more. It's definitely the most powerful and fastest keyboard. On par with swiftkey except the cloud sync feature. Once you you set it up to your needs your type as fast as with a blackberry either with one hand (by swiping) or with two hands (by tapping). But again swiftkey and touchpad are very powerful too and at the end it's a matter of taste.
Swype is still quite popular but doesn't have good multi language support and the experience is not that smooth compared to the other ones.
[+] [-] thomasahle|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jadyoyster|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ebiester|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frandroid|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xerophtye|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tloewald|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerf|12 years ago|reply
I suspected as much when it came to Swype; it's nice to see someone who has actually done the work verify this intuition. I use Dvorak on my physical keyboards, but I find it sort of... ironic, for lack of a better word... that the suboptimality of QWERTY is itself the key to how these alternate sloppy-keyboards work. It's sort of nice that my QWERTY skills don't entirely go to waste...
[+] [-] wxs|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diminoten|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrmch|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wxs|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ericmsimons|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wxs|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buro9|12 years ago|reply
1) Network communication (full network access)
2) Your social information (read your contacts)
?
The first makes it sound like it's a keylogger, and stops me in my tracks.
The second... just why on Earth would a keyboard need to have a list of contacts? Are you going to spam my friends?
If #2 was asked for without #1, I could charitably hope that the contacts are just used for word suggestions based on names and addresses. But due to #2 being asked for in addition to #1 I really just think this is a spam machine at best, and a leaking of private contacts at worse.
Is anyone from Minuum on here who can explain why those permissions would be required.
[+] [-] mutemule|12 years ago|reply
As far as reading my social information, I have no idea why it requests that. However, upon checking XPrivacy, I can see that it has never even attempted to access accounts, contacts, SMS/MMS, etc. Which would lead me to speculate that this is either a mechanism for recommendations, or used to build up dictionaries. (Edit: I never have the keyboard build up dictionaries, so I never told Minuum to try to do anything along those lines.)
[+] [-] buro9|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ToastyMallows|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgon|12 years ago|reply
1 - Small keyboard makes it hard to look at the keyboard itself as you type forcing me to actually touch type on my phone. This has allowed me to catch way more typos as I write and has also helped my writing as I can focus more on the flow of the words than on the act of typing.
2 - Screen real estate. I know that phone screens are huge, but if you want to write something longer being able to read more of what you have written without having to constantly stop and scroll is great. Responding to emails and incorporating details from prior messages is much, much easier.
Cons:
1 - I find the space gesture to sometimes result in the backspace gesture being selected if I go too quick. Compared to the speed and effortlessness of fleksy this is much more finicky.
2 - The swipe up/down to pick different word corrections from fleksy is not present meaning that choosing a different word completion requires you to leave the "home row" and click on a small target. Way less convenient.
3 - The swiftkey style "start typing and just select completions to finish the sentence" style doesn't really exist, but most of my sentences weren't as canned so I didn't really use this feature.
In summary, I use minuum and like it a lot. At most you've lost like 4-5 bucks or something or like 1/2 of a footlong sub. So you really can't go wrong by just trying it out. I would also recommend fleksy if you don't like minuum as I find both to be better than swiftkey. If minuum could grab some of the fleksy features I mentioned above it would be unstoppable.
[+] [-] ssalenik|12 years ago|reply
Overall, the only real advantage of Minuum currently is its smaller size which allows you to see more of the screen... which is point. SwiftKey has more languages and currently allows for faster switching between 3 of them. And since its been around for longer is probably slightly more polished (less weird behavior when encountering weird input fields).
Oh, the other thing about Minuum is that people who haven't used it might have trouble borrowing your phone :P
[+] [-] tomaskafka|12 years ago|reply
So, sorry guys, refunded.
[+] [-] tavoe|12 years ago|reply
Whenever I try to write one of those two thing (often, think email addresses, friends names , "yo", etc) I have to fall back on regular input.
With swiftkey, this means just going back to pecking. With minuum, it means going into a menu and switching to minuum's full sized view or long pressing each region to get a zoomed in view of the keys around there to pick out the one I want.
The compactness of minuum is great, though. And when I'm entering non-proper nouns it's as fast as any keyboard (given a few days to adjust).
I paticuraly like the "swipe left for space" function.
It makes me want to try even more radical keyboards. Maybe something chord based.
[+] [-] Void_|12 years ago|reply
I wonder if typing on watches will be someday as normal as typing on phones. I would rather bet on speech recognition.
Off-topic, but I'm hoping one day programming won't be a desk job. You'll get to walk around, interact with a touch screen and just have a conversation with the computer about what should your program do.
[+] [-] frandroid|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wxs|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xdeadbeefbabe|12 years ago|reply
EDIT: add "For input"
[+] [-] pit|12 years ago|reply
It seems like I miss the space bar about five percent of the time.
To the developers, nice job and thanks for putting it on sale in the Play store.
[+] [-] morsch|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wxs|12 years ago|reply
We actually prefer to use the right slide gesture for a space, the added bonus being that then you can disable the space bar in the settings and save even more screen space.
After you've used it for a few days, I'd love to get your impressions. You can get in touch with me at [email protected] if you're interested in sending any thoughts.
[+] [-] baddox|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevcampb|12 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasher_(software)
"Dasher is an input method and computer accessibility tool which enables users to write without using a keyboard, by entering text on a screen using a pointing device such as a mouse, a touchpad, a touch screen, a roller ball, a joystick, a Push-button, a Wii Remote, or even mice operated by the foot or head."
Hard to tell how much success it ever had in terms of adoption, although I could imagine there may be users out there who find it invaluable. Certainly worth a look though as it gives a very nice visualisation of the text prediction algorithm as it goes.
[+] [-] mrt0mat0|12 years ago|reply
also: took me all of 5 seconds to get fluent at it. no joke.
[+] [-] wxs|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slacka|12 years ago|reply
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vardhamani...
[+] [-] joelgreen|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] debt|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lpmay|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tylermenezes|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spaky|12 years ago|reply
Basically the way Dvorak is optimized is sub-optimal for the Minuum disambiguation engine and so it reduces the accuracy. It turns out you're much better off with QWERTY or better yet something specifically optimized for Minuum.
[+] [-] williamsharkey|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madsravn|12 years ago|reply