Type With Your Eyes

hof writes: "Ever wanted to enter text by just looking at the screen? Take a look at Dasher. You enter text by looking or pointing to letters or words which the program thinks you are about to enter. I wonder how this can be optimized for coding -- a break for your wrists, and the code is available under GPL."

Comments

This is actually VERY practical...

[bsmoor01]

I know a guy who was born with a serious physical handicap where he has very little motor control.

He cannot write, type, or even speak. For the longest time, he actually used a board covered with the alphabet to 'talk'. He would look at the letters on the board, and you had to decifer what was being looked at. This way, he could spell out what he wanted to say. His parents were quite quick at it, and they could carry on a conversation very well.

He actually upgraded to a pair of glasses w/ a small laser on the frame a few years ago. He could then spell by looking at the keyboard, which was covered with photo-receptors. Then, the computer would talk to you Hawking-style. It was a groovy innovation. It was quite pricey, though.

Perhaps an open-source innovation such as this could open up doors for people like him. It would make equipment used for social interaction cheaper and more readily available.

Markov chains

[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.