Show HN: We created a hexagonal keyboard made for smartphones | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We created a hexagonal keyboard made for smartphones

typewise.app

35 pointsdavideberle27 comments

Hi guys! We’re David and Janis, co-founders of Typewise based in Switzerland. We’ve created a keyboard designed for smartphones. Conventional smartphone keyboards use the same layout as a typewriter, which was developed for 10-finger typing. How can a layout that was designed 200 years ago work well on a small smartphone screen?

That’s why we built a hexagonal keyboard that focuses on utilizing your two thumbs as the main tools of typing. Why hexagonal, you may ask? Well, conventional keyboards have the issue that their keys are small, resulting in a lot of typos. A recent study by Cambridge University and ETH Zurich found that 1 of 5 words written on smartphones contains typos (https://userinterfaces.aalto.fi/typing37k/). Hexagon shapes resemble our fingerprints, enabling a more comfortable typing experience that results in 4X fewer typos (using the above-mentioned typing test as comparison).

Another point about the keyboard is to protect user privacy. Most keyboard apps get access to all sorts of data, incl. GPS location or browser history, which can be very problematic. Many keyboards have been banned as a result of this overreach and abuse. Our entire keyboard, including the AI algorithms, are private-by-design, and no typing data ever leaves the device. To achieve same or even better text predictions than data-collecting alternatives such as Gboard, we’re working with top AI engineers from ETH Zurich as part of a Swiss government-funded research project. The first results will be available in early 2021 (they’ll be awesome, promised).

Which smartphone keyboard do you use? Is this something you see as an improvement? What features do you enjoy most in a smartphone keyboard? What other elements of our daily typing experience should be rethought for the digital age? What do you think of the privacy issues surrounding smartphone keyboards?

We hope you guys give it a spin. Let us know what you think, we are eager to hear your feedback

First of all, congrats for shipping! I am fully on board with the idea that mobile keyboards need some rethinking and hope to see more to happen in that space.

I don't use my phone's default keyboard, but have been locked into a different solution for a while, for better or worse. Allow me to jump straight to the questions.

> Which smartphone keyboard do you use?

I have been using Minuum since I found out there's a version for Android. I had stumbled across the Kickstarter campaign years prior but had forgotten about it until I got a Mini version of a popular smartphone at the time, and the default keyboard took up like half the screen. In a messenger I would see like two lines of the message I am responding to and in terms of user experience it was unacceptable. After making the switch to reclaim some screen estate, and learning about some other neat features (switching between languages with a single swipe was a killer feature at the time, I think Gboard does that now?) it grew on me and I haven't looked back or wished for an alternative once in 7 years or so. It has been unmaintained for years now but I'm still using it. For the peace of mind alone I would happily pay for a maintained version or an alternative, because not having a keyboard I enjoy devalues my phone to the point that I would actively avoid using it, and I am dreading the day I upgrade to a new phone and can't get the same experience anymore.

> Is this something you see as an improvement?

I might just not be the target audience, but I think the approach Minuum took is much more intuitive. It's the exact opposite, the keys are much smaller and put much closer together, but the words I type are almost always recognized, and deleting the word to retry if it's not is fast. The solution provided here is the opposite of what I want personally, provided there is a solution for me that gives me a great experience and free screen estate on top of it.

Also, the thought of using different layouts on mobile vs laptop/PC when my time is split proportionally between the two sounds alienating.

> What features do you enjoy most in a smartphone keyboard? > What other elements of our daily typing experience should be rethought for the digital age?

Screen estate. It's the number one priority besides efficiency imo. The screen should be filled with the things I want to see, not the things I have to see, as much as possible.

Fast dictionary switching. All the communities I interact with are in English. My contacts mostly aren't. This context switch happens frequently, and should be free of needless friction.

Full word deletion to retry if things don't work out. I don't know if it's me or a symptom of the keyboard I use, but deleting words letter by letter is weirdly stressful, especially with auto correct trying to be smart between every keystroke. Being able to have the word gone with one swipe is much closer to the experience I have on the computer keyboard, and I find that to be very reassuring in a way.

> What do you think of the privacy issues surrounding smartphone keyboards?

This is huge. Really. My tolerance for the invasion of privacy keeps dwindling and uncomfortable compromises keep getting more frequent.

Your permission comparison is a big selling point and the main driver that would bring me back to this solution should my preferred option eventually disappear as I dread it will.

Again, thank you for investing time in this space. It's very much needed. Sorry I don't have more positive things to say, but I hope it can still be valuable feedback in some way.

Wow, thank you for the detailed feedback! Minuum indeed takes a different, nonetheless interesting approach. Our focus lies with the data privacy of users' typing data and the hexagonal layout. In terms of switching languages, our keyboard does recognize and switch accordingly to the language typed. How do you feel about a keyboard that woulld learn from your typing behaviour (Also adapting to your language preferences)? You raise a good point with screen estate however, we will consider it for future implementations. Thank you for sharing your input :)

> How do you feel about a keyboard that woulld learn from your typing behaviour (Also adapting to your language preferences)?

Minuum does that to make sense of what you type on the tiny board. It gets better over time and I've ported my data over from the last phone. But, given how much has happened in ML over the last few years, I have no doubt it could be done much better now. I enjoy it on a per-language level, but my experience with mixing dictionaries has always been awful and more of a hindrance than anything else. I eventually gave up and switched to just swiping through languages. That has been second nature since, with basically no mental overhead.

I personally wouldn't expect mixed-dictionary as a feature, and if it's there it would have to be pretty much flawless to convince me to give up that control. Then again, this might have been a problem that particularly affects Minuum, and with no overlap between the space that letters occupy, maybe it's much more manageable.

Either way, I'm excited for what you're doing and appreciate the opportunity to geek out about this topic. Thanks for reading!

Tried this out a few months ago when it came up in a Discord server I'm in.

The swipe hold delete, and undelete is great and I love the way the punctuation worked.

However I couldn't stick with it. It would have been much better in the era of the tiny phones. But on my modern phone it feels too large. The break from standard qwerty and my standard punc/number keys was also hard. I can type mid 20s wpm on my normal phone keyboard. Going slower for a bit just felt not worth the effort.

I hope you continue though!

I just wish that keyboard vibration wasn't a pro feature. As great as a keyboard is / can be, I will likely never pay monthly for one, and I find keyboards almost unusable without some form of haptic feedback.

Same, for me, being able to use two languages at the same time is critical. But don't ever see myself paying monthly for a keyboard

Huh. I just downloaded it and like the idea, but it definitely will take an adjustment period. I generally just use the default iOS swipe keyboard, and haven't had any issues besides the occasional retroactive (incorrect) spelling correction, which are sort of annoying.

Is there any plan to implement full swipe functionality in the future? I like the idea of swiping for space/backspace, so I think extrapolating that out to a full gesture based keyboard would be a logical next step.

Thanks for the feedback, Ben! We built the Typewise keyboard with two-thumb typing in mind, so while a full swipe functionality is not yet on the horizon, we are first building a one-hand mode.

Well, I need better reading glasses.

Your website made a used of a red check mark and GPS/camera required.

Sue me for skimping through it too fast but thought you wanted to know. Rereading ensured that your app DOES NOT uses GPS position nor camera (of which I’ve actually confirmed myself).

Perhaps a nice red outline box around each competitor products would alert us fast-skimmers?

I would also understand if you did not do that, after all it is still my fault.

Good job, and keep up the good work.

Saw the "We are powering Peach" sign on your website! What does this mean? Do you support them financially?

Peach UBI follows a very interesting concept, but we do not support them financially. Luckily, there are other way ways to support a good idea :)

Many good features. I cannot switch unless a keyboard has east asian languages and a fast way to change the lang

Thanks Ben! Well, we are continuously expanding the langauges available, we started with languages using the latin alphabet, but we hope to add more soon. The AI in our keyboard already does recognize the language you are using and switches accordingly. You can also switch manually if you prefer.

Glad you included French. I speak French much better with my Android phone than with my conventional keyboard. (It can even make decent guesses about gender based on context.) I'll give yours a try and see how well it does.

Please let us know what you think of the french! We know there are some minor things that we are currently still working on fixing, e.g. improved accent recognition, but we'd love to hear your feedback to learn and adapt.

Love the keyboard, but I see it also overrides the numberpad keyboard, which I do not prefer. I wish there was a way to tell it to override my default keyboard, but keep my default numberpad keyboard.

I am trying it now. How can you guarantee that you protect privacy? Is it open source or do you have some other way of guaranteeing it?

Also, is the layout and key shape patented or is it an open standard?

So, concerning privacy: >How can you guarantee that you protect privacy? For our offline version (Offline Privacy Keyboard), you can find in the Google Play Store that we do not require permissions to access the internet. (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.icoaching.w...). Our iOS version does not require "full access" for either version, online or offline. This way Apple makes sure no one (not even us) has access to what you type. Other keyboards (such as Google) require "Full access" or allow it be enabled at the explicit permission of the user (e.g. Swiftkey). Typewise does not even have this option. There is no other guarantee. Even a certification of a provider would not help, because they would have to check every update. > Also, is the layout and key shape patented or is it an open standard? Yes, the layout and key shape are patented internationally.

Okay thanks for the explanation.

>>Also, is the layout and key shape patented or is it an open standard?

So if I spend time learning this, and then your company imposes unreasonable requirements to use the app, would I have no recourse/alternative, that doesn't involve the time going to learn the new layout going to waste?

Why is the ios app so large? It’s listed as 72.5 MB on the app store.

As our keyboard doesn't require internet, the AI and the dictionaries are entirely within the app. So while it seems large it does pack quite a punch, so to say (write).

In the light of what you said, the size is definitely reasonable. Thank you.

The keyboard and its privacy claims seemed promising but requiring a credit card to add a language is rude.

What else do you suggest as a business model?

In general the basic+pro model is Ok. I just mean basic language support is not reasonable to be considered a pro feature. There are many other advanced features to imagine.

E.g. I would gladly pay for being able to load a custom auto-completion dictionary file, for an additional programmable row of keys (where I could put anything including whole phrases, selection/search/replace macroses and system keys like Ctrl and F1-F12), gamepad-like split-overlay for the landscape mode (like in SwiftKey) etc.

I also consider requiring a credit card to start a trial so you could auto-charge once the user fails to cancel in time a soft kind of fraud but this practice is so widespread I can't blame anyone.

Using more than one language/script, however, is not a choice nor an attribute of a pro user, it's a basic thing every keyboard is meant to allow.

I am giving it a try, and I like the hexagonal keys. But I would need swipe functionality to make it my daily driver.

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