[Aerroon]

I can do about 45-50 wpm on my phone with swype typing. It would probably be faster, but words like "our" and "off" are hard because it seems like it's luck whether the keyboard picks "or" or "our", of/off.

Swype is pretty great for writing with a phone. I kind of wish there was an improved Swype though.

[Noumenon72]

Did you know that Swype stopped being available on Android in 2018?[1] I just learned this, and I still haven't found a keyboard that lets you do Ctrl+C and Ctrl+Z like Swype did. Tried SwiftKey and Gboard.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swype

[thaumasiotes]

I use swipe-style input (don't know whether it's actually swype) for most things. It's somewhat annoying that it can't tell the difference between words with identical swipe patterns.

I find it more annoying that it can't even attempt to render words that it doesn't know. The reason is exactly the same as its inability to distinguish "isn't" from "orange" -- there just isn't enough information in a swipe to identify any intended letters. But a failure to recognize a novel word means you can't correct the IME - you have no other option but to switch input methods.

[Aerroon]

I think Swype could rely more on repeatable patterns. Eg if you're swyping in a straight line and want a letter included from that you should do a little loop on it. Eg with "our" I do a little loop on "u" and it doesn't pick "or" anymore. But it does then also pick "out"...

It should be way more accurate on the starting and ending characters. If I'm starting with "i" I'm not going for "orange".

One thing that frequently trips me up are names. I'm swyping a regular word and it thinks I want to use a name I've never used before.

[lights0123]

SwiftKey definitely notices if you do an extra movement on a letter—it's quite easy to differentiate between "to" and "too" with that strategy, even when it doesn't have the rest of the sentence for context.

[thaumasiotes]

> It should be way more accurate on the starting and ending characters. If I'm starting with "i" I'm not going for "orange".

The whole point of using a very-low-fidelity input method is that it's faster. How much care and effort are you planning to put into entering each word?

[Cheetah26]

Swype is absolutely fantastic when it works right. I also agree that it would greatly benefit from having a better algorithm behind it.

Given how accurate search suggestion algorithms are becoming, I find it surprising that keyboard suggestions are as bad as they are. If swype could have the same predictive abilities as search engines it would be a major boost in speed and comfort.

[snet0]

I was with my previous girlfriend for ~5 years, and have basically been using Gboard the entire time. We communicated via various messaging services literally every single day. If I was to try swipe-type her name right now, there is a 50% chance that it will suggest a different but similar name that I think I have literally never accepted as a suggestion.

I was expecting this feature when I got my first Android phone over a decade ago, and I am still waiting for it. Is there some engineering step that I'm missing? Model my typing history and use that for prediction weightings. Is this unfeasible on my phone hardware?

[Noumenon72]

Swype lets you long-press a suggestion and choose to never suggest that again.

[HPsquared]

Google's Android keyboard (GBoard) has swiping capability. Still not great, I think the problem is the keyboard isn't able to go back and correct previously typed words based on subsequent contextual information.