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Ask HN: How do you get started writing "predicting" software?

by calebjosue on 5/16/24, 10:19 PM with 3 comments

I've seen some cell phones being able to predict the word you are trying to write when you slide your finger on the letters composing a word.

How do you get started writing software like that? Is it a computer software trained over data on finger movement?

I hope I am making myself clear, the one in which you slide your finger over the letters on a keyboard on a screen, and the Program comes up with the word you want to write.

Thanks!!!

  • by JohnFen on 5/16/24, 10:22 PM

    I always assumed that was just using spell-check in a unique way. I could absolutely be wrong about that, though.

    What I'd probably do is to start scouring the literature for "predictive text algorithms" and see where that rabbit hole leads.

  • by sim7c00 on 5/17/24, 2:35 AM

    i think those things just like the ai things are just probability based. which word, token or letter is most likely, based on occurences seen in large data sets.

    thats not to say prediction is not a thing, like forecasting. but thats also generally based on large datasets / historical data, and perhaps as much 'context' as you can get.

    context being whats around the thing u want to predict thats related to it in some way.

  • by bpiche on 5/17/24, 4:00 AM

    That's character-level n-gram modeling