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> “It’s at least half way to able-bodied typing speed, and that’s why this paper is in Nature.”

> The participant was able to communicate at about 90 characters, or 18 words, per minute.

> By comparison, able-bodied people close in age to the study participant can type on a smartphone at about 23 words per minute, the authors say. Adults can type on a full keyboard at an average of about 40 words per minute.

Thanks, I thought from the headline this was enabling over 200wpm maybe.

Same. One of the reasons I hate using my phone to type is how slow I am compared to using a full keyboard. This would be hell for me.

The current generation is a bunch of thumb typers. Ye abandon all hope..

I don't know if it's cultural, but as someone of the 'current generation' (Gen Z), I feel that the opposite is true and typing speeds increase as you get younger (to some limit).

I've tried to back this up and only found a single, questionable, data source[0] on the topic but I do attend several typing competitions and some of the young ages are phenomenal. I was beaten a few months ago by a 15 year old who was typing >220wpm+ for 5 minutes.

[0] http://drwes.blogspot.com/2011/01/results-are-in-age-vs-typi...

I'll second the other Gen z person in the replies and say that lots of us hate thumb typing and if we're going to generalize across every single living person by one factor, my experience is that typing speed goes down with age.

The original iPhone is the perfect size for my hands and thumb typing.

I was quite fast in landscape due to the placement of everything and my ability to also rock the phone while I typed. This increased my speed dramatically.

Sadly, that is not really an option anymore as I gladly give it up for the larger real estate of the 6" models.

If I have something long to say and I'm not too concerned about accuracy, I just use text to speech.

That makes me wonder whether cell phones should let you customize the keyboard, esp. the size of it.

I used to type "semi-competitively" (aka just spending a lot of time on typeracer.com) and could get around 170 WPM if I put enough effort into it. (At least when I was younger. Probably slower now.)

18 WPM would make me feel like a snail. However, I feel fairly confident that within 1 - 3 decades some kind of BCI will let any user surpass the equivalent of 200 - 300 WPM after a bit of training. And hopefully even with a device that sits on your head rather than in your brain.

So I'm just kind of looking at this like ML research circa 1990. We're hardly even in the infancy stage yet.

Where do you get that confidence? Reading the article, I'm mostly seeing somewhat deliberately hyped-up claims and hand-wavey references to AI, neither of which give me much confidence in this tech taking a tremendous leap anytime soon. Still very impressive, but as someone who knows nothing about the tech, I'm not sure why I should expect it to improve so quickly?

The fact that we can apparently detect repeatable patterns of brain activity, and do it across a few modalities (handwriting, cursor movements) shows that a lot of the core problems are solved. We’ve achieved Proof of Concept.

With greater sensor fidelity, greater quantity of data, improved ML approaches combined with alternate detection targets (particularly subvocalisation) means that getting to faster than parity WPM seems like a realistic result. Incremental improvements to tech is something we humans are quite good at.

Well, I did say 1 - 3 decades, which isn't "anytime soon" I think. I just think the potential has been demonstrated, and to me it seems fairly feasible that if you hypothetically had a device that could transmit thoughts at near the speed of thought, you could get around 200 - 300 WPM. If it could somehow interpret more abstract things like images, then the information density could be higher, too.

I could be wrong, though. Maybe people's thinking rates wildly vary. And maybe my 170 WPM was pretty close to my actual speed of thought. It also may depend a lot on if it's something you're thinking about on the fly vs. regurgitating existing thoughts.

> 18 WPM would make me feel like a snail.

On the other hand, this interface is for people who have a current typing speed of approximately 0 WPM (or ~8 WPM if they were lucky enough to have the previous leading BCI technology available to them). So it's all about perspective.

Very true. I'd be overjoyed to have it if I were in such a situation.

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