Saturday, October 2, 2010

BlindType

BlindType, recently acquired by Google.

With a goal of becoming the largest player in the industry, BlindType Inc will provide the innovative BlindType touch-typing software to most manufacturers of touch screen devices and operating systems. The unprecedented prediction accuracy of BlindType redefines how people will interact with touch screen devices for years to come.

The problem

With most of the mobile manufactures nowadays having replaced the T9 or QWERTY keyboards with touch screens, users have lost the feeling of the actual letters they press while typing. As a result, typing text on a touch sensitive screen can be quite a challenge, as not having any real tactile feedback and at the same time trying to pinpoint tiny letters usually leads to numerous spelling errors.

Although there have been many and various approaches trying to aid the typists, all prediction and auto correction software assume a static representation of the virtual keyboard at a predefined location on the touch screen of the device.

The user currently needs to have their complete focus on the screen at all times while typing, and still be frustrated at the spelling errors that their auto correction system will not fix, even though they seem too obvious.

The solution

Most inputs are just not “errors”. There is a reason the user touched the screen where they did, and a truly intelligent system should just figure out that reason.

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Exclusive: I Used BlindType, Virtual Keyboard of the Future

When I tried the program on an iPad I could relax about mistakes. Not in spelling, but in the actual way I actually tried to hit keys on the touchscreen keyboard. Do you have fat fingers like me? Not a problem. Do your hands migrate slowly as you type? It can handle that too. Hold your iPad to one side, type in progressively larger or smaller movements, even ditch the keyboard altogether. BlindType can deal with it all. Just watch and learn:

If you found the above demonstration for BlindType impressive, you’re not alone. The video received more than 300,000 hits in its first week. Those are great numbers for a tech demo from a startup on YouTube. Kostas and Panos were so impressed with the positive response they even created a follow up thank you video