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It's baffling that there are no open-source implementations of proper swipe typing, at least for Android. AnySoftKeyboard has it, but it's not nearly the same as Swype and such, and is prone to mistakes. It could use some kind of a better approach.

Notably, with Swype and OKeyboard I could drag my thumb just in the vicinity of the target letters, and they tended to guess the word right, basing the guess mostly on the turns in the swipe (at least it felt that way). ASK requires me to tap the first letter precisely, and is sensitive to me hitting the subsequent ones, while the corners of the swipe aren't so useful.

Using a closed-source keyboard app feels very icky. OKeyboard was fine and advertised that it's secure because it has no permission to access the network—until it suddenly added that permission in an update, without changing the app description.



FlorisBoard is open source and has an implementation for this (en-us only for now): https://github.com/florisboard/florisboard

It's okay, but definitely worse than proprietary alternatives right now. But at least it's under active development.


Anysoftkeyboard (https://anysoftkeyboard.github.io/) has swype as, though in beta. I currently switch back and forth between ASK and florisboard.


> basing the guess mostly on the turns in the swipe

Btw, a consequence of Swype&company's algorithm is the bit of entertainment that you can get by dragging the thumb whatever which way over the keyboard: they still pop up some word guesses. ASK kinda tries to assemble a word from the letters you hit on the way instead (there's an explanation in the Github issues), so in the end it comes up with nothing.

A more useful aspect of the behaviour is that with a turn-respecting algo, it's easy to correct its mistakes by making a small peak in the swipe trajectory on the wanted letter.




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