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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

I have used Swype texting since the t9 days.

If I demoed swype texting as it functions in my day to day life to someone used to a querty keyboard they would never adopt it

The rate at which it makes wrong assumptions about the word, or I have to fix it is probably 10% to 20% of the time

However because it’s so easy to fix this is not an issue and it doesn’t slow me down at all. So within the context of the different types of text Systems out there, I t’s the best thing going for me personally, but it takes some time to learn how to use it.

This is every product.

If you demonstrated to people how something will actually work after 100 hours of habituation and compensation for edge cases, nobody would ever adopt anything.

I’m not sure how to solve this because both are bad.

(Edit: I’m keeping all my typos as meta-comment on this given that I’m posting via swype on my phone :))

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Showing a product in its best light is one thing. Demonstrating a mode of operation that doesn't exist is entirely another. It would be like if a demo of your swipe keyboard included telepathic mind control for correcting errors.

I’m not sure I’d agree that what they showed will never be possible and in fact my whole point is that I think Google can most likely deliver on that in this specific case. Chalk it up to my experience in the space, but from what I can see it looks like something Google can actually execute on (unlike many areas where they fail on product regularly).

I would agree completely that it’s not ready for consumers the way it was displayed, which is my point.

I do want to add that I believe that the right way to do these types of new product rollout is not with these giant public announcements.

In fact, I think generally speaking the “right” way to do something like this demonstrates only things that are possible robustly. However that’s not the market that Google lives in. They’re capitalists trying to make as much money as possible. I’m simply evaluating that what they’re showing I think is absolutely technically possible and I think Google can deliver it even if its not ready today.

Do I think it’s supremely ethical the way that they did it? No I don’t.

The voice interaction part didn't look a far cry from what we are doing with Dynamic Interaction at SoundHound. Because of this I assumed (like many it seems) that they had caught up.

And it's dangerous to assume they can just "deliver later". It's not that simple. If it is why not bake it in right now instead of committing fraud?

This is damaging to companies that walk the walk and then people have literally said to me "but what about that Gemini"? and dismiss our work.

I feel that more than you realize

That was basically what magic leap did to the whole AR development market. Everyone deep in it knew they couldn’t do it but they messed up so badly that it basically killed the entire industry

So let's not give big tech benefit of the doubt on this one. We have to call them out but even then the lie is already half way around the world...

I don't care what google could, in theory, deliver on some time in the future maybe. That's irrelevant. They are demonstrating something that can't be done with the product as they are selling it.

Does swype make editing easier somehow? iOS spellcheck has negative value. I turned it off years ago and it reduced errors but there are still typos to fix.

Unfortunately iOS text editing is also completely worthless. It forces strange selections and inserts edited text in awkward ways.

I’m a QWERTY texter but text entry on iOS is a complete disaster that has only gotten worse over time.

I'm an iOS user and prefer the swipe input implementation in GBoard over the one in the native keyboard. I'm not sure what the differences are, but GBoard just seems to overall make fewer mistakes and do a better job correcting itself from context.

Have you tried the native keyboard since iOS 17? It’s quite a lot better than older versions.

As I was reading Andrew's comment to myself, I was trying to figure out when and why I stopped using swype typing on my phone. Then it hit me – I stopped after I switched from Android to iOS a few years ago. Something about the iOS implementation just doesn't feel right.

Apple's version is shit. Period. That's why.

But you can install other keyboards like SwiftKey or Gboard which are closer to what you are used to on Android.

My only issue is that no keyboard implementation really supports more than two languages which makes me switch back to plain qwerty with autocomplete all the time.

Hard disagree. I could type your whole comment without any typos completely blindly (except maybe "QWERTY" because uppercaps don't get autocorrected).

Apple autocorrect has a tendency to replace technical terms with similar words, eg. rvm turns into rum or ram or something.

It's even worse on the watch somehow. I take care to hit every key exactly, the correct word is there, I hit space, boom replaced with a completely different word. On the watch it seems to replace almost every word with bullshit, not just technical terms.

> seems to replace almost every word with bullshit

Sort of related, it also doesn't let you cuss. It will insist on replacing fuck with pretty much anything else. I had to add fuck to the custom replacement dictionary so it would let me be. What language I choose to use is mine and mine alone, I don't want Nanny to clean it up.

Maybe my fingers are just too big but the watch for anything like texting is basically impossible for me to use.

They've pretty much solved this with iOS 17. You can even use naughty words now, provided you use it for a day or so to have it get used to your vocabulary.

> However because it’s so easy to fix this is not an issue and it doesn’t slow me down at all.

But that's a different issue than LLM hallucinations.

With Swype, you already know what the correct output looks like. If the output doesn't match what you wanted, you immediately understand and fix it.

When you ask an LLM a question, you don't necessarily know the right answer. If the output looks confident enough, people take it as the truth. Outside of experimenting and testing, people aren't using LLMs to ask questions for which they already know the correct answer.

The insight here is that the speed of correction is a crucial component of the perceived long-term value of an interface technology.

It is the main reason that handwriting recognition did not displace keyboards. Once the handwriting is converted to text, it’s easier to fix errors with a pointer and keyboard. So after a few rounds of this most people start thinking: might as well just start with the pointer and keyboard and save some time.

So the question is, how easy is it to detect and correct errors in generative AI output? And the unfortunate answer is that unless you already know the answer you’re asking for, it can be very difficult to pick out the errors.

I think this is a good rebuttal.

Yeah the feedback loop with consumers has a higher likelihood of being detrimental, so even if the iteration rate is high, it’s potentially high cost at each step.

I think the current trend is to nerf the models or otherwise put bumpers on them so people can’t hurt themselves. That’s one approach that is brittle at best and someone with more risk tolerance (OpenAI) will exploit that risk gap.

It’s a contradiction then at best and depending on the level of unearned trust from the misleading marketing, will certainly lead to some really odd externalities

Think “man follows google maps directions into pond” but for vastly more things.

I really hated marketing before but yeah this really proves the warning I make in the AI addendum to my scarcity theory (in my bio).

I know marketing is marketing, but it's bad form IMO to "demo" something in a manner totally detached from its actual manner of use. A swype keyboard takes practice to use, but the demos of that sort of input typically show it being used in a realistic way, even if the demo driver is an "expert".

This is the sort of demo that 1) gives people a misleading idea of what the product can actually do; and 2) ultimately contributes to the inevitable cynical backlash.

If the product is really great, people can see it in a realistic demo of its capabilities.

I think you mean swipe. Swype was a brilliant third party keyboard app for Android which was better at text prediction and manual correction than Gboard is today. If however you really do still use Swype then please tell me how because I miss it.

Ha good point, and yes I agree Swype continues to be the best text input technology that I’ll never be able to use again. I guess I just committed genericide here but I meant the general “swiping” process at this point

I don't buy it. OpenAI did not have to do it with ChatGPT, and they always include a live demo when they release new products.

Maybe you can spice up a demo, but misleading to the point of implying things are generated when they're not (like the audio example) is pretty bad.

What is the latency is Swype? < 10ms? Not at all comparable to the video.

> This is every product.

Except actual good ones, like ChatGPT or Gmail (by their time).

You make a decent point, but you might underestimate how much this Gemini demo is faked[0].

In your Swype analogy, it would be as if Swype works by having to write out on a piece of paper the general goal of what you're trying to convey, then having to write each individual letter on a Post-it, only for you to then organize these Post-its in the correct order yourself.

This process would then be translated into a slick promo video of someone swiping away on their keyboard.

This is not a matter of “eh, it doesn't 100% work as smooth as advertised.”

0: https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/07/googles-best-gemini-demo-w...

Its honestly pretty mind boggling that we’d even use querty on a smartphone. The entire point of the layout is to keep your fingers on the home row. Meanwhile people text with a single or two thumbs 100% of the time.

I use 8vim[0] from time to time, it's a good idea but needs a dictionary/autocompletion. You can get ok speeds after an hour of usage.

[0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/inc.flide.vi8/

"The entire point of the layout is to keep your fingers on the home row."

No, that is how you're told to type. You have to be told to type that way precisely because QWERTY is not designed to keep your fingers on the home row. If you type in a layout that is designed to do that, you don't need to be told to keep your fingers on the home row, because you naturally will.

Nobody really knows what the designers were thinking, which I do not mean as sarcasm, I mean it straight. History lost that information. But whatever they were thinking that is clearly not it because it is plainly obvious just by looking at it how bad it is at that. Nobody trying to design a layout for "keeping your fingers on the home row" would leave hjkl(semicolon) under the resting position of the dominant hand for ~90% of the people.

This, perhaps in one of technical history's great ironies, makes it a fairly good keyboard for swype-like technologies! A keyboard layout like Dvorak that has "aoeui" all right next to each other and "dhtns" on the other would be constantly having trouble figuring out which one you meant between "hat" and "ten" to name just one example. "uio" on qwerty could probably stand a bit more separation, but "a" and "e" are generally far enough apart that at least for me they don't end up confused, and pushing the most common consonants towards the outer part of the keyboard rather than clustering them next to each other in the center (on the home row) helps them be distinguishable too. "fghjkl" is almost a probability dead zone, and the "asd" on the left are generally reasonably distinct even if you kinda miss one of them badly.

I don't know what an optimal swype keyboard would be, and there's probably still a good 10% gain to be made if someone tried to make one, but it wouldn't be enough to justify learning a new layout.

> Nobody really knows what the designers were thinking, which I do not mean as sarcasm, I mean it straight. History lost that information.

My understanding of QWERTY layout is that it was designed so that characters frequently used in succession should not be able to be typed in rapid succession, so that typewriter hammers had less chance of colliding. Or is this an urban myth?

My understanding (which is my recollections of a dive into typewriter history decades ago) is that avoiding typebar collisions was a real concern, but that the general consensus was that the exact final layout was strongly influenced by allowing salesmen to quickly type out 'typewriter' on the top row of letters.

I love this explanation.

You have to be taught to use the home row because the natural inclination for most people is to peck and hunt with their two index fingers. Watch how old people or young kids type. That being said staying on the home row is how you type fast and make the most of the layout. Everything is comfortably reachable for the most part unless you are a windows user ime.

If you learn a keyboard layout where the home row is actually the most common keys you use, you will not have to be encouraged to use the home row. You just will. I know, because I have, and I never "tried" to use the home row.

People don't hunt and peck after years of keyboard use because of the keyboard; they do it because of the keyboard layout.

If you want to prove I'm wrong, go learn Dvorak or Colemak and show me that once you're comfortable you still hunt and peck. You won't be, because it wouldn't even make sense. Or, less effort, find a hunt & peck Dvorak or Colemak user who is definitely at the "comfortable" phase.

People will actually avoid using their nondominant fingers like their ring or pinky. Its an issue with typing irrespective of layout. Its an issue with guitarplaying even. I am no pianist but I wouldn’t be surprised if new players have an aversion towards using those fingers as well.

I understand how dvorak is designed. I am still not convinced people will be using all their fingers especially their pinkys in a consistent manner that without learning that this is what you should work towards.

I really shouldn't be astonished at the number of people who will prioritize their own theorizing over the field report of someone who actually did the thing in question, but yet still somehow I am.

I did it. It happened. Theorizing about why it didn't happen is not terribly productive.

Hold up young one. The reason for QWERTYs design has absolutely not been lost to history yet.

The design was to spread out the hammers of the most frequently used letters to reduce the frequency of hammer jamming back when people actually used typewriters and not computers.

The problem it attempted to improve upon, and which is was pretty effective at, is just a problem that no longer exists.

I’m curious how this works because all the common letters seem to be next to each other on the left side of the keyboard

The original intent I do believe was not separating the hammers per se, but also helping the hands alternate, so they would naturally not jam as much.

However, I use a Dvorak layout and my hands feel like they alternate better on that due to the vowels being all on one hand. The letters are also in more sensical locations, at least for English writing.

It can get annoying when G and C are next to each other, and M and W, but most of the time I type faster on Dvorak than I ever did on Qwerty. It helps that I learned during a time where I used qwerty at work and Dvorak at home, so the mental switch only takes a few seconds now.

Also apocryphal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#Contemporaneous_alterna...

And it does a bad job at it, which is further evidence that it was not the design consideration. People may not have been able to run a quick perl script over a few gigabytes of English text, but they would have gotten much closer if that was the desire. I don't believe that was their goal but they were just too stupid to get it even close to right.

> The design was to spread out the hammers of the most frequently used letters to reduce the frequency of hammer jamming

That's a folk myth that's mostly debunked.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-...

The reason we use qwerty on a smartphone is extremely straightforward: people tend to know where to look for the keys already, so it's easy to adopt to even though it's not "efficient". We know it better than we know the positions of letters in the alphabet. You can easily see the difference if you're ever presented with an onscreen keyboard that's in alphabetical order instead of qwerty (TVs do this a lot, for some reason, and it's a different physical input method but alpha order really does make you have to stop and hunt). It slows you down quite a bit.

That's definitely a good reason why, but perhaps if iOS or Android were to research what the best layout is for typical touch screen typing and release that as a new default, people would find it quite quick to learn a second layout and soon get just the benefits?

After all, with TVs I've had the same experience as you with the annoying alphabetical keyboard, but we type into they maybe a couple of times a year, or maybe once in 5 years, whereas if we changed our phone keyboard layout we'd likely get used to it quite quickly.

Even if not going so far as to push it as a new default for all users (I'm willing to accept the possibility that I'm speaking for myself as the kind of geeky person who wouldn't mind the initial inconvenience of a new kb layout if it meant saving time in the long run, and that maybe a large majority of people would just hate it too much to be willing to give it a chance), they could at least figure out what the best layout is (maybe this has been studied and decided already, by somebody?) and offer that as an option for us geeks.

Even most technically-minded people still use QWERTY on full-size computer keyboards despite it being a terrible layout for a number of reasons. I really doubt a new, nonstandard keyboard would get much if any traction on phones.

T9 was fine for typing and probably hundreds of millions of people used it.

It only worked because it had to, given phones just had keypads back then. As soon as qwerty-with-your-thumbs was available, everyone abandoned T9 and never looked back.

Path dependency is the reason for this, and is the reason why a lot of things are the way they are. An early goal with smart phone keyboards was to take a tool that everyone already knew how to use, and port it over with as little friction as possible. If smart phones happened to be invented before external keyboards the layouts probably would have been quite different.

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