It's hard for me to say intuitively regarding speed and the Swype, but I can see that Swype would probably increase accuracy by some statistically significant amount.
This device, based on my intuition, would probably offer significant increases in wpm, and definitely increase accuracy significantly.
It's not a question of being genuinely happy or not- if something better comes along, than obviously it should be adopted.
A lot of people are expressing doubt about the utility of faster typing speed--rightly so, since that is the focus of the article. However, as a prose writer, I'm actually quite excited about this kind of device. When I'm typing 50,000+ characters of prose per week, every week, that's a lot of finger strain with a QWERTY keyboard--and I feel it. If a device let me accomplish that work with less net impact on my hands, even if it wasn't any faster, I would embrace that in a heartbeat.
> On a somewhat related note, I've been trying Swype recently. After a couple weeks, I'm still not more efficient than regular typing, but I could see how I might get there eventually. I'd be curious to know what others have found the learning curve to be—how long it takes to "break even" and whether efficiency continues to improve for months.
Paradoxically, the most expeditious approach to efficiently employing the benefits of swiping keyboards is to overwhelmingly express yourself using a lengthened vocabulary, because the algorithm's computations become greatly facilitated and the necessity of manually selecting among equivalent possibilities is lessened.
Really interesting app! So it's possible to read up to 1000 wpm using that, pretty incredible. I guess an implication there is that we should in theory be able to 'produce' a lot more wpm, using better tools than a keyboard. Do you know of any research in that area?
I'd be ok with it being "as good" as my current coding setup, at least if it improves my other typing speed. A vast majority of my correspondence these days involves me typing (as I've made , so being able to speed that up would still be cool, though I doubt it's going to be a categorical difference in my day-to-day life.
Though it does look slower than the standard qwerty keyboard with predictive text. I think it could speed up entering passwords or URLs. Actually anything needing precise input that does not easily benefit from contextual text prediction.
I agree entirely (hence the various qualifiers in my post). The amazing WPM cited on the Twiddler page comes from a quote from Thad Starner, who is a prominent wearable computing researcher and one of the Twiddler's leading advocates. Some of his research on actual typing speeds, here:
> I type ~80WPM with 90%+ accuracy, but I don't find that typing speed is my blocker, rather the speed of a coherent thought. Maybe typing at ludicrous speeds will channel some deep stream of consciousness?
I agree with this, at least to some extent. If I'm rote copying something from a text (e.g., from a typing test website), I can achieve 130-140wpm easily. If I'm creating original thought or trying to actually compose a reply to someone, I think much slower than I can type. It takes a lot more effort to compose logical sentences that make sense on paper than it does to type them, in my experience.
What really makes me want to try these alternate input systems is the allure of being able to type while walking outside at speed, which is something I can't do on a smartphone. CharaChorder seems like it's nice on a desk, but the same could be said for a plain stenography keyboard/machine.
The typing speed increase wasn't my main concern, it is just a side-effect that I felt would be easily measurable and that some people might care about. I also wanted to get an estimate for how long it would take me to become accustomed to the new keyboard, so measuring typing speed in a rigorous, empirical way seemed the best option. The main reason I did this was ergonomics.
Agree, but think there’s potential for improved typing speed on desktop. I just learned about this new keyboard (called CharaChorder) that lets you type 300WPM+ by pressing multiple multi-directional keys at once (ie “chording” keys). Could definitely see it taking off with professionals who are bottlenecked by typing speed.
My point is more of it being not a bad thing to improve on.
Most of the cases where you needed actual really fast travel have been covered for a long time and the number of careers or situations where a person need to travel fast have been declining for a long time, but I think we can all agree faster travel times are better.
Side note: stenography and chorded words with something like Plover (similar to the above) is where really fast typing usually comes into play for. I have not looked into any of the above because the pain of changing my habits hasn’t been worth the benefits to me yet.
I’ve considered it when I had to do interview transcripts, but ultimately I didn’t want to make the investment. I hope future generations are able to learn on something more designed for contemporary use than QWERTY and classic keyboards - I know my wrists have thanked me for moving to a split keyboard for the ergonomics alone.
"It feels faster for me" actually might be a decent form of decision-making. The bottleneck in software isn't user-input speed, so it's kind of moot. If people feel better using the keyboard for input, why not let them feel better?
This device, based on my intuition, would probably offer significant increases in wpm, and definitely increase accuracy significantly.
It's not a question of being genuinely happy or not- if something better comes along, than obviously it should be adopted.
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