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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

Is there a keyboard that uses GPT-2 or some other such LLM to predict what I'm trying to write? SwiftKey is amazing because I can tap in the general vicinity of keys and it always writes the right thing, but it's fairly abandoned with a few perplexing bugs.

I'd love to find a maintained keyboard that can predict as well as SwiftKey, and has all the other "simple" niceties SwiftKey has on Android (second layer with long press, configurable durations, customizable keys, emoji search, etc).

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[FUTO Keyboard](https://keyboard.futo.org/) uses a local LLM for suggestions and corrections.

Thank you!

I like the idea of their keyboard a lot, but I wish they didn't use that license.

I don't like it either. I'm glad they started calling it Source First™ instead of incorrectly calling it open source though.

I use it, it is not very good, ie. it is pretty bad in terms of predictions. Love the mission and everything, just prediction is bad.

I thought once it learns it will be better, but it's been months..

FUTO is mediocre with swiping and predictions in my experience, but the 70M parameter voice model is stunningly good at 30-second voice to text. It has completely changed how I think about using my phone to draft prose - my first drafts are now often from my phone, snippets collected in moments when it occurs to me on-the-fly. It's been a really significant shift in the utility of my phone, and because it's installable through F-Droid, I have it on my Amazon tablet, and Boox reader. It's worked really well across all of them.

Have you tried it recently? Their predictions/corrections were great for me.

Ive been using it exclusively for months, and while I do like it, I ended up turning off predictions because of how bad they were. The swipe typing feature is also pretty bad, which is my biggest gripe with it since I love typing like that.

Yeah, it's choosing extremely esoteric words for me, and clearly missing the beginning of many swipes (despite drawing the trail correctly). Almost unusably bad swiping imo.

E.g. "so" with a nearly prefect straight line clearly drawn within both keys -> it chose "SSSI". What even is that? Or "drawn" there chose "Den", which is apparently a proper noun because ("cause") I didn't ("Ivy") hit shift.

They are aware of that, that's why they recently decided to create their own swiping dataset. As of today they have not released the updated swiping functions after training it again but it's in the pipelines and I'm really excited for it.

I must thank you for the recommendation. Works offline, not cluttered, good defaults, plenty of options and some clever one, voice input and prediction both work well for me, no subscription but instead you can buy a lifetime license to support them. Also it looks good and responsive. I love it.

> Is there a keyboard that uses GPT-2 or some other such LLM to predict what I'm trying to write? SwiftKey is amazing because I can tap in the general vicinity of keys

You don't need GPT for that, you need a dictionary lookup and some stats on how the keyboard is used. See how Ken Kocienda implemented the original virtual keyboard for iOS: https://hiddenheroes.netguru.com/hurst-han-kocienda Scroll down to "But as promising as the Purple interface was, the software suffered from a potentially fatal flaw: it was impossible to use a virtual keyboard on a phone-sized screen. "

Well, I know I don't need it, but it's still nice. I'm writing this with FUTO right now, and it's fantastic, it's correcting all my little mistypes to the exact right thing.

Apparently the iPhone predictions literally do use GPT-2, or at least a model based on it:

https://jackcook.com/2023/09/08/predictive-text.html

It’s too bad that its swiping performance is so shockingly bad. I cannot ever get it to swipe the word you without tapping a correction from the gray bar. The mandatory way it interprets swiping to those 3 letters, no matter how precise, is always turned into “your.”

I hate the iOS keyboard situation so much. Third party ones either crash and dump you randomly on the Apple one, or they have their own frustrating bugs. And the Apple one is of course more stable (or maybe just relaunches so fast nobody knows when it crashes) but it is ruined by its lack of a number row (or any other options) as well as bugs like the above.

You you you I am swiping you.

That’s funny. It works fine for me. Although swiping comes out as “sweeping”.

yeah no amount of resetting keyboard settings or anything else can change that for me. I've seen others that can swipe 'you.' :/

Maybe Apple would suggest that I take 2-3 days to fully dedicate to re-setting-up from scratch. Or maybe I'd do that and find that some corrupt entry in an iCloud-synced database was responsible and I would also need a fresh Apple ID.

The only thing I really want is a keyboard that doesn't think I'm trying to type "Ava" all the time I'm typing "and". Dictionary removal would be just great. I don't ever intend to type "Ava". It has been my intention exactly Zero times.

I get the same with SwiftKey, it tries to replace "my" with "NY", which I never ever mean. FUTO has a blacklist, at least. I'm going to switch back to Android just for the keyboards.

That and 'Mr' when I try to type 'me.' It's so frustrating. If I ever mean to type either Mr or NY, I'll do it myself!

Do you by chance have a contact named Ava in your address book? If so you can try changing their name, or disabling the option to provide auto complete suggestions from your address book

No. I know nobody with that name. The only time it is in my record is the dozens of times the phone wrongly guessed that's what I was trying to do and I sent it.

Just a slight, tiny, grammatical parser would fix this. Nothing heavy. Just a look behind parser

You just did! Twice!

it's always so strange to see people on the opposite side of precision spectrum

I disable auto-correct and word suggestions, always get annoyed by "drag around and find out what your mistap gave you!" features - and here I read someone _dreaming_ about "general vicinity" understand-er

fascinating

> SwiftKey is amazing because I can tap in the general vicinity of keys and it always writes the right thing

Not my experience at all. Been using it for 10 years, whenever I manage to write a 10 word sentence without needing to correct anything I feel like i just won the lottery.

The keyboard with the best prediction and self learning was my (first smartphone) Sony Xperia Z5 from 2015. I only realized it was a Sony specific app later in life. (I didn't understand auto correction memes until I got a work phone with a google keyboard.) Sadly they don't offer it as a stand alone app. I would pay for it.

I have settled for FUTO Keyboard for now. Bevor that I used SwiftKey. (The Sony is still the only one where I did see contextual self-learning/prediction.)

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