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Comment by zz1 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, really exciting!

And I know I am (not) being paranoid, but imagine how excited NSAs of the world all will be! A new kind of keyboard, that has capabilities to understand and predict what the user will write? This just looks like something Facebook could also be interested into (if you think at their "I keep what you wrote and deleted before even publishing" attitude).

This kind of tool really needs to be open source and open hardware. Otherwise they better stay far away from me.

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This kind of cynicism is getting tiring. Being cautious about your personal information is good, but how exactly is this any worse than a bluetooth keyboard? OS X and iOS already have predictive typing with regular keyboards. There is no need for FUD.

Predictive typing for single words is usually based on a locally stored dictionary, and for sentences it can be done with a model like prediction by partial matching. The device functionality is similar to a system used for speech recognition, in that better accuracy would only be gained by sending motion and text data to the cloud at the very least in the training stage and then aggregate and analyse data using a prediction model.

However, no-one seems to care that most voice recognition tools like Siri nowadays send and store data on servers, and nearly all those aren't OSS.

> However, no-one seems to care that most voice recognition tools like Siri nowadays send and store data on servers, and nearly all those aren't OSS.

I think one of the reasons Jasper [1] was so well received was that it was offline.

[1] http://jasperproject.github.io/

Thanks for pointing out Jasper: great!

This isn't cynicism. It is the new reality we live in. We now have to look at every piece of technology we buy and do a risk analysis to see how it could leak our data. It isn't just the NSA. It is also hackers who are after our data. Having a breach, especially by the latter, is a painful mistake that can ruin your credit and turn your life upside down for decades to come.

Why risk it, open one more door to a security violation, so you can type in the air. No thanks.

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