
Swiftkey's new neural network keyboard - jcrei
http://gizmodo.com/swiftkey-has-a-neural-network-keyboard-and-its-creepily-1735430695
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yojo
It will be interesting to see what happens to language as these technologies
get better. Would you rather type out your ideal word, or tap the suggestion
that is close enough?

If this type of good prediction grows widespread it could be a force toward
standardization/avoidance of language drift. it could also discourage more in
depth conversation, which may be less likely to get favorable auto-suggest.

~~~
gtf21
This is a really interesting idea that I hadn't thought of. It could have
implications for the ability of people to express their ideas, and thus on
their imaginations. It reminds me a little of Newspeak. Not that I'm
suggesting that SwiftKey's neural net is some sort of Orwellian thought-
controlling tool by design or mistake, but it's an interesting idea that as we
get the benefit of accurate autocorrect (I don't actually use autocorrect on
any of my devices), we start to lose both the individuality of expression, and
then the imagination that fuels that expression.

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anon4
"Eerie" "creepy" "scary"... You keep using that word. I do not think it means
what you think it means…

Did someone pay gizmodo to write a faux-praise article, or is this shlock par
for the course?

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Grue3
It's Gawker Media, of course shlock is their bread and butter.

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wodenokoto
It's worth noting that neural networks has been used for Chinese and Japanese
keyboards for some years now.

Here's a nice (and easy to read, even if you don't know how written Japanese
works) paper on the structure of a Japanese IME called Simeji by Baidu:

Wu, Xianchao, Rixin Xiao, and Xiaoxin Chen. “Using the Web to Train a Mobile
Device Oriented Japanese Input Method Editor,” 2013.
[http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/I/I13/I13-1172.pdf](http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/I/I13/I13-1172.pdf)

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JulianMorrison
Keyception.

 _It was a dark and stormy night, and_ I will be in touch with you to discuss
the position with you and your family are doing well and that you are not the
only one I have to say that I am a beautiful person and I love you and I love
you and I love you _(repeats)_

 _What is_ the best way to get the money to you and I will be in touch with
you to discuss the position

 _Who_ will be able to get the job done and I will be in touch with you

 _Why_ I was not able to get to the point where I want to be a part of the
team and the team will be able to get the job done

~~~
jcrei
It's interesting to see how simplistic these are at the moment

~~~
JulianMorrison
Probably just a very limited set of bootstrap training data. I'm curious what
keyception would look like after a few months of using it.

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finstell
Swiftkey is great except it does not work at my iPhone. Before neural network
enhancements, they should work on the basics.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=swiftkey+iphone+issues](https://www.google.com/search?q=swiftkey+iphone+issues)

[https://support.swiftkey.com/hc/en-
us/articles/201310402-Why...](https://support.swiftkey.com/hc/en-
us/articles/201310402-Why-does-SwiftKey-Keyboard-sometimes-disappear-on-iOS-
apps-)

~~~
Karunamon
As per your first link, that's a problem with iOS and the brain dead way they
implemented third party keyboards, not Swiftkey. All of them are a little bit
glitchy.

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tmikaeld
How private is it? Does it send keystrokes?

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jcrei
As far as I've read, all keyboards have full access, so they send all info and
keystrokes back to their servers

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kawera
Does anyone know of a predictive keyboard for the desktop, something geared
for natural language and not just IDE's code autocomplete.

~~~
wodenokoto
Not for English, but for Japanese and Chinese it is fairly common to have
predictive elements.

Even the standard IME in at least OSX has predictive elements.

~~~
kawera
Thanks, I didn't know that. Would love to have something similar for other
languages, though.

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wowtip
Only english, or also for other languages?

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mtgx
English, from what I can see.

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mtgx
I wonder if it can take advantage of Qualcomm's Zeroth neural processor in the
Snapdragon 820.

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iLemming
Swiftkey's flow still sucks compared to Swype.

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taiar
I thought that people already stopped using Swiftkey.

