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  • Hacker News
  • Great timing given I just installed SwiftKey since Microsoft has started embedding ads and dark pattern redirects to Bing!
    by Sebguer
  • Assuming you mean uninstall, yeah I did the same because of that.

    I wasn getting a constant panel from them regarding using the backup feature, that will just keep re appearing.

    It was so bad I even moved to GBoard. Not the same, but I'm getting used to.

    by ericol
  • You meant uninstalled, right ?

    It’s unfortunate that the Bing team at Microsoft has so much power. They destroy products for the glory of Bing, and some money. Perhaps it’s about the money. But I feel like Microsoft doesn’t have to make a lot of money on everything they do.

    by speedgoose
  • This keyboard seems to ship with a dictionary that includes a lot of curse words. No more ducking around.
    by sholladay
  • I can't see what's wrong with that (you choose whether to accept suggestions or not), but you can always blacklist predictions by long-pressing on them.
    by a022311
  • What dictionary are you using? I installed the app on android and am not able to type "fuck", neither with the inbuilt dictionary nor from an imported English (UK) dictionary from their site. Even typing it manually doesn't seem to add it to the dictionary, which makes it really annoying to use.
    by ta8903
  • What I really want is a swipe model that can tune to multiple languages simultaneously when a keyboard layout can support it (English + German, German + French, etc). I rarely need more than 2 languages simultaneously, but the "switching between 2 languages" point is painful.
    by kstenerud
  • This would be cool. I suspect that people don't implement this model because it's a long tail of users requesting this. This is totally feasible technically.
    by dhruvbird
  • Yes, this is a showstopper for me. Preciso escrever in several languages.
    by projektfu
  • Trilingual here. Gboard on my pixel 10 pro does support swipe type while code switching between multiple languages. Works reasonably well. Accuracy is a bit lower for words that are collisions across languages
    by defenestrated
  • edit: NOT guaranteed to be free and open! seems to have a confusing license setup. Boooo! Works good though, I'll take it over Gboard.

    This is such a massive deal. This is, as far as I can tell, the first useful free and open Swipe model. This paves the way for things like swipe typing on platforms other than iOS and Android, a major pain point to newcomer OSes.

    by functionmouse
  • Futo with the new swipe model is the first android keyboard i've used that I don't feel like i'm compromising vs GBoard.

    Integrated speak to text, good autocorrect typing, good autocorrect swiping.

    by prism56
  • After experiencing Nintype on iOS many years ago, I can't use any other swipe keyboard anymore. I'm stuck using the stock keyboard for typing, and sometimes (rarely) swiping a word or two when I din't have two hands available. Swiping (with one finger) when holding my phone with both hands just feels unnatural and sluggish. I wish Apple had just bought/sherlocked Nintype and integrated it into the stock keyboard.
    by Vingdoloras
  • Yes! Nintype is incredible and is the only reason I refuse to upgrade my phone.
    by precompute
  • Heliboard (f-droid) supports two thumb swipe! Not as good as nintype but works very well
    by backscratches
  • Completely agree! The author made a buggy android port of nintype (called keyboard 69) that I used for years. The UX was incredible, and every swipe system I've tried since feels downright clumsy by comparison. Two finger swipe is peak ergonomics, but unfortunately I think it's an innovation that's simply too niche.
    by mightyham
  • Looks like they are working on multi-finger swipe for the keyboard, the library seems to support it [0].

    > The library also supports recognizing two-finger simultaneous swipe input through the SwipeEngine::recognize_multi method.

    [0]: https://gitlab.futo.org/keyboard/swipe-library#inputs

    by CalebJohn
  • Omg I was using that too! I was actually wondering whether FUTO had any features that supported typing one word with multiple concurrent (or not) swipes. I guess it does not but dang what a blast from the past. I had forgotten the app name too! Was using it since before Apple started actually allowing third party keyboards officially
    by PlotCitizen
  • Very cool. I'm a big fan of swipe. So much so that a bunch of us a Grammarly re-implemented it using a similar technique about 2 years ago on the Grammarly iOS keyboard, so if you want to experience something similar on iOS, you can head to the app store https://apps.apple.com/us/app/grammarly-ai-keyboard-notes/id... and use the qwerty english keyboard layout to get this neural net version of swipe.

    See https://www.grammarly.com/blog/engineering/deep-learning-swi... for more details - it's very similar to the architecture described by the FUTO folks.

    One key difference is that the learned model does not decode in a context sensitive manner but does it a word at a time. The main reason is because we wanted to release this soon and wanted the user's personal dictionary (i.e. contact names, etc... to show up correctly when swiped). It would have been nice if we could have followed through with the context sensitive decoding as described by the FUTO folks. It would really help with accuracy when dealing with words like:

    1. (food, good, hood) 2. (you, toy, rot) 3. (our, or, it) etc...

    (Disclaimer: I am one of the authors of the Grammarly swipe system as described in the linked blog post).

    by dhruvbird
  • Tried Grammarly, could you possibly include a few more onboarding animations and reminders to upgrade to the paid version? I almost finished typing a word.
    by serpix
  • Fun fact for the first apple keyboard layout on the first iphone, the touchscreen hadn't the resolution to tell appart which letter you meant to type in, so it changed dynamically the "hitboxes" of the letter buttons when you typed a certain letter. (for instance if you typed the letter "i", the hitbox of "t", and "n" were changed to be bigger, because there is a high probability you were hitting those next. Here is an article that talks about it : https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/26/creation-of-the-first-iphone...
    by GL26
  • im fairly sure gboard does the same thing. it will bias towards certain subsequent keys based on the current input. im sure there's a whole bunch of tricks keyboard apps use to make typing "feel" accurate.
    by superxpro12
  • FUTO keyboard actually has an option for this (enabled by default) called "Smart key-hit detection". It adjusts hitboxes based on dictionary predictions for what you just typed.
    by a022311
  • >the touchscreen hadn't the resolution to tell appart which letter you meant to type in

    Is that really true? My memory of the original iPhone's touch screen is that it was pretty much pixel-accurate.

    The article mentions that the keyboard wasn't accurate enough: "But by early 2006, the iPhone keyboard still didn’t have the accuracy Apple needed to ship the phone." I don't think that means the screen wasn't accurate; all it means is that the original iPhone had a small screen, so the buttons on the keyboard were tiny, and hitting them precisely was difficult. That's why the hit boxes of more likely keys were enlarged.

    by InsideOutSanta
  • For anyone wondering: the library uses the GPLv3 (good) while the Android keyboard uses the Futo License (shit).

    - https://gitlab.futo.org/keyboard/swipe-library/-/blob/master...

    - https://github.com/futo-org/android-keyboard/blob/master/LIC...

    by HiPhish
  • > Futo License (shit)

    Clearly not a cuck license (https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-i-use-the-gpl-and-not-cuc...) so looks good to me.

    by kamikazechaser
  • > shit

    It's just a commercial license with very mild terms.

    by nine_k
  • What's particularly objectionable about the Futo License?

    Is it this part?

    you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software related to payment to the Licensor in any copy you distribute to others.

    by rkagerer
  • To add to the license complexity, the model uses another FUTO-written license, though it at least does not seem as bad as the license for the keyboard:

    https://huggingface.co/futo-org/futo-swipe/blob/main/LICENSE...

    by cge
  • Awesome. I've been using FUTO keyboard for two years now and it's the best free & private keyboard I found, but swiping has been really bad for all these keyboards which was such a pain because I use swiping a lot.

    Nice to see the hour of swiping I did adding to their dataset actually helped. I'm using it now and it feels as good as the Google keyboard.

    Edit: It is sending me a little that it keeps swiping "whats" instead of "what's" though, hopefully they fix that later.

    by popcar2