Lots of suggestions
Posted: Wed Mar 31, 2010 5:13 am
I like Smart Keyboard. Much more than BK. I want you to overtake them, so I'm going to try my best to help you. I am a previous TouchPal user from Windows Mobile and they are too slow to market, so I have switched. I want you to improve so that I have something that more compares.
Try making your program do probabilistic suggestion - a common thing I type is "hey" but usually it comes out as "gey" and gets suggested as "get". If I correct it to "hey" most of the time, it should learn this and start suggesting "hey" when I misspell the word. I am not an algorithms person but I think an easy way to do this is count the number of times "hey" was selected as the correct suggestion and how many times "get" was selected. If I picked "hey" 9 times out of 10 for a correction, it should remember to suggest "hey" unless "get" is correctly spelled. You will probably have to add a weights database file separate of the general dictionary or something.
Currently if you long-press on a word suggestion, it adds it to the user dictionary even if its already in the general dictionary. This should not happen. Once you implement a weights database, you can also consider allowing the user to do word prioritization - instead of the previous behavior of adding it to the user dictionary, long-press on a word suggestion in the general dictionary could allow you to change its weight - normal, low, high. So if two words are suggested for a misspelling, the one with a HIGH priority should be the default suggestion. This way users can customize the suggested words.
add long-hold space bar or long-hold enter button to trigger events (just like a swipe gesture currently does), events such as one of the things I'm about to suggest.
custom user phrases. picture this: you long-hold the space bar or you swipe up. A screen with 4 lines appears. Each line contains a custom message that gets inserted instantly. I am sure many of you users are annoyed every time you have to type your email address with your on screen keyboard, or have to type the same phrase over and over. this fixes that. if you are on the custom phrases screen and you long-hold one of the 4 lines, you get the option to edit the phrase stored in that line or simply paste something from the clipboard as the new line.
a smiley panel. swipe up to access a bunch of different smiley faces, a "smiley keyboard" if you will.
I am not sure if this is a TouchPal patent, but touchpal allowed you to swipe up on the enter button to disable word suggestion instantly. currently you don't have a quick way to do that.
Obviously this is way too much to implement, but these are things you might consider for future iterations of the keyboard. Maybe have users on the forum vote for their most preferred feature.
i hope my writeup helped you, I sure spent a dang lot of effort thinking about it... all of the love of a keyboard...
Try making your program do probabilistic suggestion - a common thing I type is "hey" but usually it comes out as "gey" and gets suggested as "get". If I correct it to "hey" most of the time, it should learn this and start suggesting "hey" when I misspell the word. I am not an algorithms person but I think an easy way to do this is count the number of times "hey" was selected as the correct suggestion and how many times "get" was selected. If I picked "hey" 9 times out of 10 for a correction, it should remember to suggest "hey" unless "get" is correctly spelled. You will probably have to add a weights database file separate of the general dictionary or something.
Currently if you long-press on a word suggestion, it adds it to the user dictionary even if its already in the general dictionary. This should not happen. Once you implement a weights database, you can also consider allowing the user to do word prioritization - instead of the previous behavior of adding it to the user dictionary, long-press on a word suggestion in the general dictionary could allow you to change its weight - normal, low, high. So if two words are suggested for a misspelling, the one with a HIGH priority should be the default suggestion. This way users can customize the suggested words.
add long-hold space bar or long-hold enter button to trigger events (just like a swipe gesture currently does), events such as one of the things I'm about to suggest.
custom user phrases. picture this: you long-hold the space bar or you swipe up. A screen with 4 lines appears. Each line contains a custom message that gets inserted instantly. I am sure many of you users are annoyed every time you have to type your email address with your on screen keyboard, or have to type the same phrase over and over. this fixes that. if you are on the custom phrases screen and you long-hold one of the 4 lines, you get the option to edit the phrase stored in that line or simply paste something from the clipboard as the new line.
a smiley panel. swipe up to access a bunch of different smiley faces, a "smiley keyboard" if you will.
I am not sure if this is a TouchPal patent, but touchpal allowed you to swipe up on the enter button to disable word suggestion instantly. currently you don't have a quick way to do that.
Obviously this is way too much to implement, but these are things you might consider for future iterations of the keyboard. Maybe have users on the forum vote for their most preferred feature.
i hope my writeup helped you, I sure spent a dang lot of effort thinking about it... all of the love of a keyboard...
