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Next Generation T9 Keyboard Technology
Iddo Genuth writes "Cliff Kushler, the inventor of the T9 keyboard technology for numeric keypads, has developed a new alphanumeric entry technology for touch-screen laptops and Smartphone devices. This latest technology, named Swype, works with an on-screen QWERTY keyboard similar to ones found on Windows Mobile and the iPhone. The difference from the usual method of typing in the letters is that a finger or stylus is used to slide in the first letter, then without lifting the finger, the user continues writing the entire word. Only once the word is completed can the finger be lifted off. According to the developers, this leads to a much faster way of 'typing,' or as we might call it soon, 'swiping.'"
"Swyper no swyping"!
first swipe
Touchscreen keyboards to me have always been hard to use. On both the plasma-screen smartboards at my friend's A/V workplace and the ones I've seen in modern (i.e. well funded) high schools, the windows on screen keyboard and the keyboard prepackaged with the smartboard software is just terrible, partially due to the heat-sensitive surface being activated wherever my finger's heat first hits it, i.e. NOT where I wanted it to be.
This looks much more promising, and will hopefully be preventing the smartboard users from running back to a physical keyboard just to type something after using the mouse in front of the actual screen.
All these virtual keyboards are hard-coded for QWERTY, which makes even less sense for that kind of device than for a modern keyboard!
Dvorak should be an option, along with alphabetical order.
Actually for this thing, there's probably a whole new layout that's optimal. (That's an exercise for the reader to invent.)
I find it works well, unless I want to type a message in a different language. Then it really goes bad. But, I've got a Nokia, and it works great. once you make it learn a few words by spelling them yourself (usually suburb names) its great. If you wanna use slang, hit the hash key a few times, and it takes it off T9, so you can free type.
But when typing a normal SMS, T9 predictive input makes it so much easier for me.
I've had an iPhone application for quite a while that uses this. It's called WritingPad, and the about screen has a link to http://shapewriter.com/.
Google's ad engine selected "WI Portable Restrooms -- We Offer Portable Restrooms in Every Configuration & Price Range" for this page.
OK, back to the drawing board on product name.
Already exists. I think it was out the first week the iPhone App Store was open. Works pretty decently.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
I know I've already posted, but as of this post this article is tagged "fuckthegovernment".
/.? I know some of the FOSS people here are pretty diehard, but come on, wtf? What does the government have to do with T9 keyboards?
Really
Take a look at this demo of ShapeWriter from IBM. It's the same thing as Swype and was invented 5 years ago. Dr Zhai has formed a company around the tech and you can see it here: ShapeWriter.
The difference from the usual method of typing in the letters is that a finger or stylus is used to slide in the first letter, then without lifting the finger, the user continues writing the entire word. Only once the word is completed can the finger be lifted off.
That's kind of like how a Ouija board is operated, isn't it? More proof that Cliff Kushler is Satan, I guess.
Rob
Patent patent patent! Someone will either be looking to make lots by licensing some "new idea".. or stifling such innovation by use of a patent. Or maybe I'm no longer excited by any invention that wasn't born out of the RFC process anymore..
First, I never use that T9 stuff, because it never chooses the right word. Guessing the word that you want to type isn't convenient, it's annoying. Also, it doesn't allow for purposefully misspelled words and text slang.
At least in good recent implementations it does usually choose the right word, because in addition to having generic word frequency data it learns the most common words you personally use. You can also add your own words to the dictionary, so you can use as many purposefully mispelled words and slang terms as you like. You can always drop out of T9 mode for unusual requirements.
I usually dislike people who don't use T9; they tend to be the idiots who write things like "l8r" (7 key-presses, assuming you can hold the key down to get the 8 and wait between letters) instead of "later" (5 key-presses with T9, entered as fast as you like). A good T9 implementation lets me compose messages with correct spelling and punctuation more rapidly and reliably and with less effort. Messages with correct grammar, spelling and punctuation can be read more reliably and rapidly by the recipients.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Yes it does. Just edit the T9 dictionary to add the words you want.
Programing the T9 system to make is learn the words I use was half the fun. It was like training a spam filter to accept purposefully misspelled words, only without the end result being that only spam got through and all the valid email was filtered.
Ugh. I'll never code another stack after reading this :P
I'd like to see the accuracy of this system in a real-life setting. On phones with the T9 technology, I found it was faster for me to hit a key three times than to backspace every time the software made a mistake (which was frequently)...
Backspace? Mistake? It's never wrong in the sense that it never suggests a word that can't be made of the letters on the keys you pressed. Erm, you do know how to scroll through the list of suggested words on your phone, don't you? You do know that if it doesn't have a word you can add it to the dictionary and the word you enter will appear in the message you are composing, don't you? The only reason you should have to backspace is if you made a mistake, you don't want to add a word to the dictionary or you don't know how T9 works.
I suspect a lot of people get as far with T9 as entering 2337 expecting "beer", getting "adds" and deciding it doesn't work because it can't read their mind.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
i've been using the writingpad iphone app for months that does just this.
http://www.shapewriter.com/iphone.html
Why, oh why, do I never have the mod points when something like is it posted. This needs to be modded up.
Is this anything like Dasher? The demo can be seen here
T9 doesn't work really well with English, too many variables. It takes me more time to fix words than just using the standard "press numeric key until needed letter is reached" system (no idea what it is called). On the other hand, when I go to Italy I have a phone there and I use T9 and it works really well with the Italian language.
Holy crap, you are an idiot!
This made me laugh so hard I swallowed my gum and almost choked to death! Bravo, AC!
Sadly, I was the AC who posted the joke fearing karma wreckage if the mods hated the joke, and I was going to put another stack joke in there (e.g. "then I would have to pop her") but decided not to at the last minute. Got the original joke from a comedian on Comedy Central, anyway.
on my phone (nokia), "l8r" is 3 button-presses. it's in the default T9 dictionary.
Like, everyone needs caps lock don't we? ffs!
Sadly, I was the AC who posted the reply to your AC's joke because not all karma is worth giving away ;) Oh, wait.
I got the idea from a comedian -- Seth McFarlane -- in that Family Guy episode where Peter considers a vasectomy and a barbershop quartet goes into a meandering number about sexual harassment and how the chick had too huge a rack to be talking about that kind of stuff(skip to 1:07)
But I guess that's the definition of the word...I-RON-EEEEY!
I know mine sure stumbled over "rdpadily". But more to the point I had to look at each individual word in that sentence and not just the whole sentence as I normally would.
Erm, you do know how to scroll through the list of suggested words on your phone
But if you try to type BASES (22737) and have to scroll through ACRES of irrelevant words, you're not likely to be someone who CARES about T9, and using that mode isn't likely to be in the CARDS for you. How many keystrokes does it take to scroll through this list?
Yeah. Read speed on that sentence was ~50% of normal. You'd better have something REALLY fucking good to say if you're gonna make me work that hard to decipher it. ;)
How does it handle double letters?
For example, would it type my username as Goobermunch or Gobermunch? How would it know the difference? How does Swyping accommodate the William Wallaces of the world? Are they doomed to being Wiliam Walaces?
The press release leaves the question open. The ability to detect a repeated input seems to be an advantage of keypad type input. Perhaps, if you dwell for a sufficiently long period of time, it will count the character beneath the stylus twice.
--AC
What does the government have to do with T9 keyboards?
The government granted a monopoly on T9 input to Tegic (now part of Nuance).
I've just created the rotary version - with letters arranged by frequency (E in the center - others further out.) the E-writer or somesuch... or "Summoner" since it looks like you trace pentagrams on the circle. Different enough to get around the patent, I hope :)
meh
Nor does it predict when I'm typing an expletive. Seriously, that annoys me (I swear a lot because I have no imagination).
THE MAGIC WORDS ARE SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE
Only once the word is completed can the finger be lifted off.
Better not be dyslexic around devices of this kind, or it'll stick to your finger indefinitely.
It sure lends the term "StickyKeys" a new meaning!
-- Chaos, panic, pandemonium... My job here is done!
I was thinking about on-screen keyboards just yesterday. I usually avoid them, preferring real keyboards, but I was thinking, if your only choice is on screen, how would you want it to work?
My real keyboard is optimized to minimize hand and finger movement, by placing the keys I use most commonly near where my hands are supposed to be. However, it is limited by the medium: the keys have to be in the same place all the time. An on-screen keyboard doesn't have this limitation: you can put the "keys" wherever you want them to be at any time you like. Does anyone have experience with on-screen keyboards that do this (I know there are some)?
I was thinking that what you could do is have some kind of frequency table, and arrange symbols in order of frequency, taking into account the symbols that have already been typed. Then, symbols that are more likely to be the next symbol you want to enter would receive preferential treatment, in that they would be closer to the current position of the stylus and/or larger. This would speed up and reduce the effort for entering common combinations, at the expense of uncommon ones. It's sort of like Huffmann coding, and I think it might produce good results. On the other hand, I can imagine that symbols shifting around like that would be really, really annoying.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Tap method!
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned SureType- the system the BlackBerry Pearl uses. The keyboard is laid out in QWERTY style, but there are two letters per key. This allows for fewer possible words than a T9 per key-press and also allows for faster typing because of the high likelihood of tapping on the same key consecutively or alternating between the same sets of two or three keys. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Blackberrypearl.JPG for a look at the layout.
Of course, there are more problems with T9 than writing "l8r" (as your "a good T9 implementation" quote starts to hint). There are other systems (e.g. WordWise and LetterWise) that don't have many of the problems of T9, but you are usually stuck with what your phone has (or perhaps not if you have a smartphone).
Back to topic though, I am trying to draw paths with one finger on my PDA, and it certainly takes me a lot more time and effort than tapping (usually with two fingers). And all this without actually being sure that their software will give me the right word... I think I'll pass!
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
For the life of me I could not figure out "l8r". I kept seeing I ate her, and thought who in the heck would keep saying that...
Then I saw the first letter was not an I, but an L and it says later...
Why do I have this problem... Its called dyslexia, and I have pretty bad... Even my wife often looks at me in pure puzzlement.
Personally I hate T9 since I can never get out a message for the life of me. I completely prefer the keyboard.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
GNOME has better virtual-keyboard. You just type wanted letter and then you start moving mouse towards other letters. It needs and dictionary to know what words you are wanting to type and it predicts the needed letters bigger ones. So you can hit them more easily. You should find it from usability-menu.
This looks like the Shark typing method created for IBM a few years back.
I really liked the Shark idea when it first came out, so it's good to see something similar again. (Plus Shark worked on non-QWERTY 'boards as well, you just changed the settings on its initialisation)
I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
The swypo.
I've lived with RSI since 1993 - you get used to recognising things that do not help ergonomically. This looks like one of those things.
One of the major problems with RSI is that prolonged activation of muscle groups leads to fatigue. The term for this is static loading.
This is why click and release mouse behaviour (to activate menus, then click again to choose) is better for your health than the alternative method (click and hold, release to choose) because the alternative forces you to hold the mouse button down until you make your choice.
This keyboard idea is doing the same thing.
I suspect healthy people may like this keyboard and those suffering from RSI will dislike it greatly.
Info on RSI and remedial exercises: http://www.objmedia.demon.co.uk/rsi/rsi_srk.html
Stephen
Considering the price for sending one message in the US, compressing later into l8r lets you send more text for the same price :-)
If I understood the idea correctly, tracing paths between letters gives you a curve, or at least a broken line with points where individual letters should stand. That means that, with practice, you simply draw a curve describing the word you want to enter.
Having started learning Chinese a few months ago, I'm beginning to wonder if we're re-inventing the wheel here...
Ignore this signature. By order.
I usually dislike people who don't use T9; they tend to be the idiots who write things like "l8r"
You sir, are certainly a judgmental idiot. I agree with the GP. I have a poor opinion of T9, because it rarely ever gets the right word. I usually write specific messages that don't fit to the canned word guesses it has. Trying to use it often turns out to be more work than it saves, at least for me. And I don't write in leet or in the SMS lingo.
As one of the many poor typists out there, I don't see why we still have to choose between looking at the keyboard and learning to touch type. A touch keyboard, detecting my finger positions, could coordinate with a translucent virtual kbd on screen that also displayed my finger positions. The virtual kbd would be made to appear and disappear with appropriate gestures. Addional feedback would include haptic, sound, & 'hover' keys. And, as the whole thing is virtual, it would reconfigure on the fly to cope with any language, which simplifies life for the PC manufacturer. The touch keyboard would still need some kind of display but it could be pretty basic. Oh dear - I hope I haven't described this in too much detail. I wouldn't want some poor patent troll to starve...
--- Yx3 = Delilah ---
I don't know what that's called either, but it's been more than great. Each key can be pressed to the left or to the right, resulting in a different letter. What it gives me is a small, full keyboard, no need for T9, and no need for tiny tiny keys like a blackberry or a Palm. I love it :)
"From here you can get an excellent view of my foot." ~ Pai Mei.
That would be already made, and called Dasher. See an earlier post for a Youtube video, or try it out at their site. Works reasonably well, almost like magic. But then, so does ShapeWriter.
I had a similar idea, character's aranged in rings growing from the center.
! @ # $ % ^ & *
( l f k p r z )
- b g a o v =
[ c h e * u w ]
; d n i y x '
\ , . ? ! /
Where A, E, I, O, and U form the center most ring. Inside that ring is a double, shift, space, and backspace buttons. Consinants would have to be arranged meaningfully (I just tossed them up alphabetically and swapped the vowels)
I'm highly tempted to try writting such a tool in silverlight now...
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Personally, I've let the whole SMS thing slide until recently - the whole concept of messaging text with 12 buttons is unpleasant and something that I didn't feel like paying to use (and yes, I tried the T9 thing - found it just as bad).
This changed when I bought a Samsung Pixon and, finally, I'm happy with an SMS interface - touch screen qwerty available by rotating the device by 90 degrees, and each keypress gets a physical feedback via a subtle vibration. It has a predictive T9 type of interface too, but tbh, I find that more obtrusive and confusing than just using the keyboard.
I hope when this phone dies on me, I'll be able to replace it with a cheaper model with a similar interface and that the current forms of 12 button interfaces are only provided as an option (if at all).
I have an LG phone and I hate the T9 implementation that it uses. It's more effective for me to punch ~30% more keys than to deal with the mostly inaccurate recommendations. T9 only makes typing more efficient when you can accurately predict what it's going to recommend, and it actually recommends appropriate words.
Why is it that every time I open a fresh installation of OpenOffice.org Writer I have to find and disable automatic word completion. Maybe it's just me, but on a full-sized keyboard this feature does far more harm than good for users who already type efficiently. For example, if I'm typing a ten-letter word it's much faster and easier for me to just type the ten letters than it is to wait for the software to make a recommendation, hope that it's the right one, acknowledge the word as correct and accept it, and then return to my train of thought.
I find it interesting that you apparently judged me "certainly a judgemental idiot" on the basis of one sentence where I observed a correlation. FYI I don't dislike people for not using T9, though the number of people I've got to know who use txt-speak and haven't found to be in some way rather obnoxious is extremely small.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
It sounds ok for every day English use, but what about other languages?
And what if a word is not found? how is the word then typed?
Dvorak work?
That fucking shit pops up on my cell when i enter contact notes, and it has preferential placement at position 1 whereas ABC is position 2. The boneheads pushing or "pimplementing" t9 have earned title of the most hated assholes in my book of tech gripes. My blood pressure goes off the scale when i find myself blindly typing in t9 by touch only to look down and find bullshit gibberish that has NO bearing to what i am thinking or typing. Typos i can live with if i hit sent, but finding umpteen unrelated, garbled, jacked up shit on my screen makes me want to choke people at sprint and anywhere else t9 oozes from. I hope there is a way to eviscerate it from my device/s in future deployments. t9 never learns nor even comes CLOSE to what i am typing. If it learned, it would take note of what i replaced its loony suggestion with. Well, actually, it wont' -- since i escape from t9 before my gasket gets too close to popping.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
First, I never use that T9 stuff, because it never chooses the right word.
Haven't you ever considered, that the latter is caused by the former? Or is your phone just that outdated.
T9 learns your word preferences, new words, and unused words in every modern phone I hah in the last years.
My T9 dictionary knew nearly all of my slang words after a month of usage. On my next phone, i even created an SMS with my most used non-included words on the first day.
For purposefully misspelled words, there's a simple solution: Spell it right, and then replace just the letter(s) you want to change. Of course this only works comfortable when your phone supports quick switching of modes and editing functions, which mine (Nokia smartphone) did.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
on my phone later would be, lets see 3 keys for the l8r then the usual send key, etc.
..and thus is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but with a whimper.
What about if I dislike T9 because I have to look at the screen while I'm typing? I mean, I usually write messages while I'm walking around, and it's nice to... you know, watch where I'm going.