Smartphones Are Reinventing—And Ditching—the KeyboardQuote:
In the future, your smartphone won't auto-correct your errors. It will correct them before they're even made.
It will know you really meant to hit the "K" key on your screen when you hit the "L" key. Maybe even one day, there won't be a traditional keyboard at all, if some entrepreneurs have their way.
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New-wave keyboards work to "infer" what the user is trying to type. They use evidence collected about the user, like typing history on social networks, where they are on the Web, or what terms are trending on the Web to determine what word to select next.
SwiftKey takes that one step further. "The way we do this is essentially by modeling the surface of the keyboard as a series of probability distributions," said Ben Medlock, chief technology officer at TouchType Ltd., the U.K. company behind SwiftKey. In other words, it knows where on a screen you are most likely to tap when pressing a certain key. Eventually, it will recognize that you mean to hit a "W," not a "Q."
[
WSJ]
Quote:
Actually, few people ever wrote letters. For the messages that it was occasionally necessary to send, there were printed postcards with long lists of phrases, and you struck out the ones that were inapplicable.
[
George Orwell, "1984"]