The Electronic Slide

A new feature I've been using on my phone is trace typing. On the standard Android virtual keyboard, you don't have to hit each key individually, Blackberry-typing-style. Instead, you can just slide your finger/thumb over the keyboard to each of the letters in your word. It will infer from the path which word you meant. I don't know many devices this is available on; even if it has Android, a phone/tablet may have a proprietary keyboard, so it may not work for you. But you can still download Google's standard Android keyboard.

I've been critical of phone technology in the past, and recently of Google itself, but I have to admit, I'm amazed at how well this works. I've been using the slide technique to type this entire article so far, and although I've had to retype the odd word when my movements were a little careless, it's managed to recognize each word. In fact, it's very good at interpreting sloppy traces around the keyboard, even when my thumb careens wildly around resembling Tim Tebow's throwing motion. For instance, when I typed, "movements" I just sent my thumb back and forth across the board, only in the general direction of the needed keys, yet it somehow made sense my virtual scribble.

It's taken some getting used to. Twenty years of touch typing have left my brain with no conscious awareness of where the letters on a qwerty keyboard are. So I sometimes forget where I'm going half way through a word, and make a wrong turn. Yet it manages to figure out my intentions anyway a lot of the time. Okay, as I'm typing that, I had one of those lost moments, and turned "intentions" into "injunctions."

My point is, this is the opposite of so much artificially intelligent things that try to be helpful but misunderstands you even when you're trying to be clear. Finally here's A.I. tech that exceeds expectations.