We’re so used to smartphones that by now, we can pretty much type out texts without looking at the keyboard.
However, we’ve surely all experienced the curse of autocorrect — a tool that is supposed to help us look grammatically and punctuality intelligent, but can sometimes do us a disservice by ‘correcting’ us with words that don’t make sense or are completely inappropriate.
Well hopefully, AI is here to help. It’s about ducking time.
The latest version of the keyboard app Typewise uses artificial intelligence to make us the most design-savvy keyboard yet.
Launching today, Typewise 3.0 combines autocorrection, language detection and a user-friendly “honeycomb” layout, to help us type faster with fewer errors.
As in earlier versions of the keyboard, the design features hexagonal keys, that is better suited to two-thumb typing for fingers of all shapes and sizes, with or without your nails done.
Typewise’s latest version uses AI technology so that the keyboard can accurately correct mistakes that make sense within a sentence, use the correct language and therefore, the correct spelling and accurately predict what you’re going to write next.
“Typewise began as a solution to make daily life easier, to put a stop to annoying typos and cumbersome typing,” said digital strategist David Eberle, who co-founded Typewise alongside data scientist Janis Berneker.
“Our mission is to change the way we input information into our devices.”
The founders collaborated with ETH Zurich to develop this new version, following their study that found one in five words written on a smartphone contained typos.
The developers claim that Typewise can reduce the number of typos by 75% and result in 33% faster typing speeds.
“While everything about the smartphone is from the 21st century, the keyboard comes from the 19th century and hasn’t really changed,” Eberle told Dezeen.
“It wasn’t made for fast typing; it was made to suit the mechanical limitations of the typewriter,” he continued. “And while it works reasonably well for laptops, it doesn’t work for smartphones.”
The amazing “text prediction technology” of Typewise 3.0 contains AI algorithms, which not only helps to identify and correct mistakes but also learns from your habits so that it can make better suggestions.
The features about this keyboard alternative for smartphones that really get us excited are its language detection and its promise of privacy. The language detection is so good, it allows bilingual users to easily switch between languages, even in a single message.
The privacy element of Typewise is something that other keyboards don’t offer. Many keyboards process everything you type into them, but Typewise doesn’t share any data back to the developers.
“Most keyboards have network access, which means they can capture everything you type and send it across the internet: GPS location, calendar, and some even look at your bookmarks and browser history,” Eberle stated.
“With Typewise, the keyboard is sandboxed,” he added. “All the user personalisation happens on the device itself, no user typing data is sent across the internet.”
You can download the Typewise app today.
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