Thumb-Key

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Thumb-Key is a privacy-conscious smart keyboard, made specifically for your thumbs.

It features a 3x3 grid layout, as many older phones had, and uses swipes for the less common letters. Initial testing shows that you can reach ~25 words per minute after a day of use.

Instead of relying on profit-driven, privacy-offending word and sentence prediction for accuracy, as do most popular phone keyboards like Gboard and Swiftkey, Thumb-Key uses large keys with predictable positions, to prevent your eyes from hunting and pecking for letters.

As the key positions get ingrained into your muscle memory, eventually you'll be able to appromixate the fast speeds of touch-typing, your eyes never having to leave the text edit area.

This project is a follow-up to the now unmaintained (and closed-source) MessageEase Keyboard, which is its main inspiration.

founded 2 years ago

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dessalines@lemmy.ml

Programming help wanted: AI-determined letter positions. (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 years ago by dessalines@lemmy.ml to c/thumbkey@lemmy.ml

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On desktop, I use the AI-designed Halmak Keyboard, and its had great results.

Rather than manually picking letter positions, Halmak was designed by an evolutionary algorithm, based on a given set of criteria, and sample text.

I designed the original english thumb-key layout manually, with trial-and-error, and based essentially on 3 criteria:

Letter frequency
Alternating thumbs
Thumbs come from the bottom corners, so lower and edge tiles are easier than higher.

But I did not take into account things like digrams / trigrams, and I don't know enough about evolutionary algorithms to do it.

Would anyone be interested in tackling this problem?

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[–] Cassilda@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I do agree that digrams/trigrams turn out to be the most important thing in this kind of layout. The MessagEase layout seems to get a lot of digrams right, even if it's only by accident. I think the real problem is that we don't have a very good model for the relative costs of things like non-alternating thumbs and sliding from the same box after a tap. I think the optimization algorithm would probably not be that hard relative to quantifying the costs of different placements.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

True, its tough to say whether things like having the O and U , on the same key is optimal. We do really need someone to help AI design layouts tho.