"he did win another typing competition using the CharaChorder to hit 267 WPM with 76% accuracy."
76% accuracy doesn't sound so great to me, no matter how fast I can type on it.
76% accuracy doesn't sound so great to me, no matter how fast I can type on it.
Me: "yes, as a matter of fact I am"
Interviewer: "Whats 14x27"
Me: "49"
Interviewer: "that's not even close"
me: "yeah, but it was fast"
Shamelessly stolen, but yeah, 76% accuracy is only 3/4s of characters typed correctly; if that "works" you could probably just train yourself to not even type the lesser used parts of the alphabet ...
So if you type 100 characters and 24 of them are incorrect, the counted total is 100 - 10*24 < 0, independent of the test length.
This was in the time of typewriters; computerized text entry did exist but was certainly not ubiquitous. There was no real way to correct mistakes, so I can imagine typing correctly from the beginning was a bigger deal than it is now.
It is not a good way to measure "typing speed".
With such programs, the WPM score measures how many total times per minute you "finished" a correct word, including any time spent correcting the word; with the accuracy score measuring how much extra work was done, on average, doing those corrections.
stats
wpm - total amount of characters in the correctly typed words (including spaces), divided by 5 and normalised to 60 seconds.
raw wpm - calculated just like wpm, but also includes incorrect words.
acc - percentage of correctly pressed keys.
char - correct characters / incorrect characters. Calculated after the test has ended.
consistency - based on the variance of your raw wpm. Closer to 100% is better. Calculated using the coefficient of variation of raw wpm and mapped onto a scale from 0 to 100.
So, they assume the average word has 5 characters. Makes sense for computing wpm in random text.
Only in tests is there an option to check against what is expected. In the real world you could at most apply some dictionary and grammar checks, and we know those can go either way. Those tools don't know what you actually wanted to write after all, and still suggest without comprehension.
1. used a fuzzy autocorrect of the same kind mobile OSes and word processors have (not correcting to the known text, but instead only doing what such logic usually does — only attempting to correct words if they're not recognized as words; and only moving them to the lowest-Levenstein-distance match.)
2. treated words that are correct after autocorrection as being "correct", with no ding to accuracy.
Since accuracy is about how much extra time and effort the human typist has to spend to get the text correct, and since text that can be auto-corrected requires zero human time and effort to correct, it shouldn't really be considered incorrect.
Or, to put that another way: if I'm typing really fast on my phone's keyboard, and all the right words are ending up on the screen, what does it matter if I'm hitting the right keys with my thumbs? It's the WPM and accuracy of the cybernetic system composed of me + the auto-correct that matters.
In that sense, you can sort of think of an auto-correct as actually being a very similar thing to a stenographic keyboard (at least, in the hands of a person who knows how to take advantage of it): it's really a system to enable accelerated typing, by allowing you to key in the letters of a word out-of-order or simultaneously and have the word come out in-order.
I hated these ones so much in school because I'd be like 3 letters past the typo and reflexively hit backspace 4 times to get rid of the typo, which just registered as more mistakes because it had blocked those 3 additional letters and so would only accept 1 backspace.
(I'd already learned how to type from having to quickly enter chat messages in StarCraft multiplayer)
The real benefit to this speed/accuracy is that when writing long-form text, rather than say programming, the speed of typing can either match or exceed the thought process. There is a huge amount of utility in this approach and the keyboard becomes a true extension of the mind. I'm still waiting to find a good real-time auto-correct that doesn't screw with my flow at high WPM, I'd pay pretty good money to have something that just works out of the box.
On a practical note, I've considered trying to hit the numbers that the author claims, but I'm already so limited by my own train of thought. With the additional finger/wrist strain (And yes, there is _significant_ strain when these levels are approached for any length of time) I just don't see the costs making sense when everything can be fixed in just a few clicks after typing a great many paragraphs of text.
It's the same for me. I doubt I can hit 200 WPM, but when I'm typing what I'm thinking (like right now) I'm significantly faster than when I type something I've never read, especially if it's just random words. On the other hand, I've never been much into measuring my WPM (I can type sufficiently fast for everything I need), so I just assumed this was a skill one can train to actually get those insane scores.
Another story, when I was middle school, I took what I thought was a computer programming class that turned out to be a god awful typing class. Of maybe 30 kids, over half would completely fail to complete the assignment during the hour. The students that got through it were almost all my video game/computer geek friends. I personally hated the class as I thought it was a complete waste of time as I could already type fairly well. The carrot on the stick was that you could surf the internet, play games, whatever, if you completed the the assignment. Considering that the internet was wildly faster than my dial up line at home, I would burn through the class as fast as I could, literally always finishing before everyone else, spending 15 minutes tops on it.
Well, one day midway through the semester I overheard another student asking the teacher how I was always done so fast. This guy was a completely smug hard ass and was apparently a 'computer guy' prior to his teaching career. He had the gual to say it was only because I would make so many mistakes and that I was such a sloppy typists that I wouldn't be worth much to anyone later on. During the next class I made a point to hit 100% accuracy, declaring loudly to him so that the entire class would hear. I did that the entire rest of the semester, I loved it, he never showed his smugness towards me after that. Still really bugged me though, I realized even back then that computers were getting _good_ and handling typos, and that highly accurate typing was mainly for suckers.
As an aside, this was all during the era of the 'Ask Jeves's' of the world, I switched to google simply because it was so damn good at understanding the intent behind my typos. Incredibly, they're _still_ the only auto-correct I've used that understands and corrects the drifts!
What do you estimate your actual WPM to have been when you wrote your whole comment?
I find that it can take time to think about what I need to put down, and often need to edit and re-phrase for my audience.
The whole WPM thing focuses on pure technical ability and ignores that there is more to writing than being a stenographer.
Being a programmer probably allows me to be faster than a lot of other speed typers for specific tasks, but I'm nowhere near as fast as they tend to be for straight word counts where the numbers tend to look like 100% accuracy at 200+ WPM. As an example, I always set my text editors to backspace both words, and sentences (ctrl+backspace, and shift+backspace). This trick, jiggling, and good searching, allows me to move through code _much_ faster than most other programmers I've meet. The only exceptions have been people who've setup and mastered vim, (sorry emacs folks, I've just never encountered any of you in the wild) and I've been slowly been working on gaining proficiency there.
Another user pointed out that there is a zen mode for monkeyType, I'm trying it out on this post. I just sat down to write for the night and I'm using this as my warmup (going this fast requires it for me). I knew a good bit of what I've wanted to say as I started this post but there have been some pauses and edits.
MonkeyType claimed 72 for this comment, bit faster than I would have guessed, I'm curious as to how realistic that number really is!
If I type the word "hello" on my CharaChorder, I type the keys `helo` which Monkeytype will recognize as an inaccuracy. The CC's internal firmware then recognizes I typed helo and wanted hello and will backspace the word and replace it, much as if you did the same thing.
Do this on enough words where the chord trigger doesn't line up with the chord and you get the ~75% number.
But the final text is 100% accurate
I think someone else in comment thread mentioned that it comes preconfigured with 500 chords--these cover the 300 most common English word (some duplicate chords in case you prefer to hit them one way or the other).
It's up to you (or someone else if you import their library) to setup and configure different chords.
This is one of my least favorite parts about the product--it's advertised such that it seems like it is magical but really it is just like have a bunch of macros.
So in this case, you might have h+l to indicate hole, or h+o, or h+e--whatever is most comfortable for you. Hole is not configured out of the box so there is no way to chord it...but it is just like a keyboard in that you can just type it. You can type h, o, l, then e just like you would on a keyboard.
It's this mixing and matching of character entry + chording which makes the device pretty interesting.