A Better Way to Enter Text On a Palmtop

DippyOz writes: "Ever wanted to speedily enter text into your palm and hate those 'look ahead' features? Dasher is a research project from Cambridge that presents an innovative way to speed up text entering by predicting and allowing you to choose from a number of choices by flying over them with your stylus (or mouse). There's Linux, Windows and PocketPC versions to download and try."

Comments

I tested it a while ago...

[Cpyder]

...and I think it's quite promising, altough at the moment I still achieve higher speeds using T9 predictive text-input (on my GSM mobile phone). Whith some improvements I really see a future for it. Certainly the eye-tracking method is intresting, eg. for paralised people (instead of a stick on a helmet to press keyboard buttons).

Markov

[Mr_Silver]

This is exactly how Dasher works, except for one crucial point: we alter the SIZE of the shelf space devoted to each book in proportion to the probability of the corresponding text

Basically they use a markov chain which has in it the probabilities that one letter will appear after another. It's very similar to the disassociated press generators you can find out there.

For example, here is one I wrote which generates new random words based on the probabilities of one pair of letters appearing after another pair. I used pairs because it generates more English-like words.

It was "taught" using the contents of /usr/dict/words and written in Perl.