EDIT: They want users to help generate a dataset. You just play a game and email them the data when you are done.
I just did it, it was easy.
That’s really cool. There are a lot of FOSS that need data collection to be accurate and useful. I wish more of them accept donation of anon data. e.g. I’d love to donate my location data in exchange of accurate transit data.
Yeah absolutely for the transit data. All the wrong people already have my data, I would happily donate my data to the right people.
Heliboard is awesome, and once you get it installed its swipe works well. I’m off Android now, but I’d turn on telemetry for Heliboard.
Swipe in my experience does need work. I’m glad they’re doing this.
GBoard, before I switched, was like 95% accurate. I could trust it for blind typing. Heliboard with the google library is maybe 70% accurate and frustrating. “typing” in that last sentence was first “topping” the second “ripping” before I tapped it out.
To this day nobody is as good as Swype was. RIP.
Same experience here. Swype was the original and somehow after all these years still the best?! Or maybe I’m misremembering because my standards were lower back then.
GBoard is noticeably better then Heliboard. I still use Heliboard but it is frustrating sometimes, to the point where I wonder if I should just start typing with my thumbs instead. Might be faster on the whole, since I sometimes lose 5-10 seconds correcting the swipos.
I will start submitting gesture data ASAP. The keyboard world needs this.
Swype was great but Swiftkey’s (pre-Microsoft) word prediction made it my favorite. It was also able to pick the correct word without me having to care about swiping over the right letters. It seemed to work just by the shape I was tracing.
This is what I use and just firewall it.
There is no live telemetry, you just email them the data when you are done.
I have to correct 50% of my words in my language (French). It keeps guessing words that don’t exist. Example: I swipe “Donc” (then) and it guess “Do’c”. What is that word?
I haven’t watched the video but Futo collected a swipe dataset which is MIT licensed.
Thats interesting and its pretty sizable with about a million words swiped. I’m not sure what heliboard is doing differently.
I love this idea so I just enabled the swipe library we have now (closed, boooo) and submitted my first set of test data. It worked just like in the video here. Neat!
If anyone sees this post and wants some more background on the keyboard and why it’s so handy, here you go:
https://www.howtogeek.com/i-tested-this-open-source-keyboard-for-a-month-and-it-replaced-gboard/NB: I am no shill just a happy user.
I’ve gotten used to Unexpected Keyboard for use with Termux, but I do agree the average folk need a keyboard for the people.
The link I was looking for which is missing in the post: https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard/wiki/Tutorial:-How-to-Contribute-Gesture-Data
The need to manually download and load a lib and then send the results manually via email is somewhat of a hassle, unfortunately.
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This has lit a fire under me, I’m gonna gesture so many words! Sucks that I have to download the proprietary library—I entirely stopped gesture typing because of that—but this is for the greater good. I’ll exclusively use it for this data collection, and nothing else. Hopefully the word spreads, and we get a massive data set which makes a great FOSS gesture library on mobile possible.
Being asked to gesture words I don’t know, or Nierenfunktionsstörung and other long German words like that 😅☠️
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FUTO Keyboard might be willing to share data. Its another open Open source keyboard. License purchase optional but encouraged.
FUTO is not open source.
I like HeliBoard but the lack of a private swipe capability made it so clunky to use. I’ve been using FUTO Keyboard on Android which has the swipe feature but runs privately offline( no network permissions). The swipe accuracy isn’t perfect but its better than typing each word.
