On desktop, I use the AI-designed Halmak Keyboard, and its had great results.

Rather than manually picking letter positions, Halmak was designed by an evolutionary algorithm, based on a given set of criteria, and sample text.

I designed the original english thumb-key layout manually, with trial-and-error, and based essentially on 3 criteria:

  • Letter frequency
  • Alternating thumbs
  • Thumbs come from the bottom corners, so lower and edge tiles are easier than higher.

But I did not take into account things like digrams / trigrams, and I don’t know enough about evolutionary algorithms to do it.

Would anyone be interested in tackling this problem?

  • Lewis144
    3·
    2 years ago

    Oh it looks like MessagEase has. I should’ve looked at their paper first.

    • DessalinesOPMA
      3·
      2 years ago

      MessageEase unfortunately didn’t do any optimization after their first 9 letters ( and I don’t fully trust what they did there either ). When it came to the swipes, they based it off of whether the letter was curly-shaped or not (curly shaped letters go off the center key)

      • Cargon
        2·
        9 months ago

        @Dessalines where did this end up? I have experience with genetic / evolutionary and similarly applicable optimization algorithms and would be interested in helping to optimize the layout.

        • DessalinesOPMA
          3·
          9 months ago

          We could definitely still use some help. Check the github issue, but dev has stalled on it.