I tried this out for the past hour or so. It takes the 9 most common letters in English and makes them easily accessible through one touch down, whereas all the other letters require a touch+swipe.
Multi-lingual support is problematic, the 9 most common letters differ per language, even if you stick to those based on a latin script. So either you end up learning multiple layouts for multiple languages, or end up doing way more touchswipes than should strictly be necessary.
Granted, I am a pretty fast and accurate two-thumb typer on a qwerty keyboard (AnySoftKeyboard) on my phone, so it might not be for me. Perhaps someone who struggles more with accurately hitting individuals keys would benefit more from this simplified keyboard
I recently built a prototype of this style of keyboard for Android for Latin and Cyrillic alphabets because of how frustrated I am with any form of input that involves dictionaries, guesswork, and tiny buttons. I then used it for half a day. It works, I can type words on it, but at least for as much time as I used it, it was slower for me than Gboard because I had to make a mental effort to remember which gesture from which button types which letter. Typos were almost nonexistent though. Now, I arranged the letters very naively, I simply took the T9 layout and adapted it for these directional swipes. It might work better if I arrange letters by frequency. For example, such that typing the most common letters would always only require a tap, the less common ones would be a swipe down (which is easier for me than other directions), and so on.
I can't agree with the grandparent about type + swipe being anywhere near the speed of a keyboard, but in my experience, writing in other languages using swipe is just as fast as in English (at least for other languages that use the Latin alphabet). I frequently use swiping for bilingual English + Romanian (a language which tends to have much longer words than English) conversations, and it generally works very well, even bilingually. I would note that I'm using some Microsoft keyboard for Android, I forget its name, and it is explicitly configured for both languages.
I use swiping on a Samsung phone and regularly write in three languages (English, Swedish, and Dutch). While there are some annoyances, I find it still speeds it up a lot as long as I change keyboard language (done by swiping left or right on the space bar) to match the language I'm currently using.
To be honest, I'm just somehow incompatible with touchscreen text input regardless of the screen size. It works 90% of the time, sure, but the remaining 10% I want to yeet the damn thing at a wall for repeatedly failing to read my mind. This is especially exacerbated when I'm typing in Russian — which I do much more than in English — where each word can have one of something like 30 different suffixes depending on the context it's used in. Computers are quite good at applying formal rules to input data, yet somehow, no touchscreen keyboard does this. You added a word to the dictionary? Too bad, that's the one form that won't be autocorrected, now add all the remaining ones.
No one seems to question whether a qwerty keyboard is a good fit for this. Everyone somehow accepts that as the only way. But in reality, it doesn't pass even the slightest scrutiny. It's qwerty because that's the layout most people are familiar with from computer keyboards. It's not optimized to take advantage of the touchscreen hardware. Instead, it's a layout that works beautifully for full hands, crammed into a screen where you have use it with just two thumbs that often miss the tiny keys.
I tried to rethink touchscreen text input once[1] but this prototype ended up having such a steep learning curve that even I myself switched back to qwerty. I might try it again sometime in the future but I'm also open to ideas.
I touchtype at around 90WPM on a keyboard and swipe/glide typing (which obviously relies heavily on autocorrect) is the only thing that makes inputting text on a smartphone somewhat almost bearable for me. Otherwise I feel like I'm trying to type with mittens while drunk.
It's reasonably fast, I don't have to aim for tiny boxes with my fat fingers and it takes care of accents when I type in french. The correction algorithm is also getting better (albeit still far from perfect); sometimes it'll correct the previous word based on what I enter next. If you want me to disable this you'll have to give me a full size keyboard as a replacement.
That might be ameliorated by choosing a touch keyboard optimized for character-by-character input rather than english text. MessagEase works well for me for that.
I find that typing on a phone (iPhone or Android) these days is substantially easier than typing on an iPad because of swipe. It's still nowhere as efficient as a keyboard in the hands of a skilled typist, but I can often produce text fast enough that it isn't worth getting out my laptop. On an iPad it's far worse, because I actually do have to use the bad QWERTY touchscreen key-by-key.
What I keep hoping for as far as input methods go is a swipe keyboard layout that is optimized for swipe, because QWERTY has a few groupings that make for ambiguities. Someone calculated one a few years ago that puts the vowels as far apart as possible [0].
I use swype now and am extremely happy with it. I can't imagine this would be any better than it. With swype, I can enter n characters with a path of at most n vertices, with this thing, it seems I need to create n differently-sized arcs. Swype also has zero learning curve, assuming you know qwerty, because you can use it as a touch keyboard by default.
It's not clear if the finger needs to be removed between letters (but I doubt it does). This would worry me.
tl;dr demonstrates a software tool for typing by navigating through a probability weighted letter cloud. The 'standard' navigation involves mousing up / down to get toward letters and forward / back for speed and backspace. 'Standard' because they determined this can be useful for people for whom a querty keyboard is a challenge (disabled or non latin alphabet). Jump to 6:43 to see it in action.
This feels like a possible tool for getting through text adventures easier. I find that I am not good at guessing the right words for something very free form, like Emily Short's _Galatea_. With Dasher embedded, I could navigate through the language model weighted by the verbs she built the game around, with less artifice / spoilers than choosing from the full list of words.
I was going to suggest maybe using this to augment my phone's swipe keyboard, such that - when it doesn't guess the word and it doesn't show up in the three suggested alternatives, I could touch the side and flow through all the alternatives it thought of. But, like the author, I can see that mode switch is worse than pure swipe or dasher.
Works well for me. You just type with one hand without ever lifting your thumb. You do need to set the correct language, and if you mix languages, your phone's OS has to be able to deal with that, but at least on iOS that is the case and the prediction is very good. If the first choice isn't correct, usually the first or second displayed alternative is what I wanted.
There are two caveats, though. Firstly, I type differently when using swipe. As it favors words from the dictionary, my texts sound less spoken and more written. And secondly, having backspace delete the whole word is a critical feature to avoiding annoyance. If none of the predictions are correct, I just tap backspace and then type the word like I usually would. This, combined with the rarity of those hiccups makes swipe typing quicker than regular typing to me.
It also helps with relaxing my wrists as I can also hold the phone with one hand and swipe with the middle finger of my other in a gesture like holding a pen, but without the pen.
Maybe there's actually a third aspect; screen and hand size. I haven't owned any big phones, my iphone 13 mini is the biggest phone I ever owned, but I do have large hands, so swipe typing with a single thumb is not very difficult. Your experience might be different depending on your anatomy and device.
Multiling O Keyboard (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=kl.ime.oh) has swipe. Accuracy is not great and it takes awhile to train but it doesn't have internet permissions at all. It's also highly configurable.
But could you swipe entire multi-syllable words in a single fluid gesture, and have it recognise what you meant? Sure, if I were pressing keys one by one, that tactile feedback would be great. But that's hardly ever how I "type" on my phone.
Swiping is a blessing on iPhone Mini, but it's not available in my language for some reason. Multilingual input, I can just start typing in English or Czech and two words in, the keyboard knows. And even for normal tap-typing, the accuracy is a bit better because the keyboard apparently learns from your mistakes and basically builds a virtual keyboard with shifted letters underneath the visible one.
(to be clear I'm petty enough to be willing to give it all up for not having to stare at a fucking Bing button, so I uninstalled it)
Swiping seems to be efficient mostly in english. I had a try on android and it was just exhausting while being unforgiving for CJK type input.
Just to say, having a decent keyboard is still important to a lot of people. And Apple has effectively made efforts in this regard to have a good keyboard experience on the iPad.
Multi lingual swipe works just fine on my iPhone with Google keyboard. If it is not it's just because I get too comfy and lazy, not actually "spelling" the words properly.
With the dawn of on device language models I believe the typing experience will get even better in the upcoming years.
The only reason swipe works so well is because of how well people know the QWERTY layout, though. You'd have to have a pretty unique situation for it to be worth your time to thoroughly learn a new keyboard layout just to speed up typing on your phone.
Multi-lingual support is problematic, the 9 most common letters differ per language, even if you stick to those based on a latin script. So either you end up learning multiple layouts for multiple languages, or end up doing way more touchswipes than should strictly be necessary.
Granted, I am a pretty fast and accurate two-thumb typer on a qwerty keyboard (AnySoftKeyboard) on my phone, so it might not be for me. Perhaps someone who struggles more with accurately hitting individuals keys would benefit more from this simplified keyboard
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