No problem :)
Side note: if anyone else is reading this and likes it - contributors are welcome.
There’s a lot of improvements to be made and I could use the help as I’m quite busy with a few other projects at the moment
407 karma · joined September 10, 2020
Building https://www.typequicker.com
social@typequicker.com
Side note: if anyone else is reading this and likes it - contributors are welcome.
There’s a lot of improvements to be made and I could use the help as I’m quite busy with a few other projects at the moment
Just a friendly heads up, I’m on mobile and I noticed that the burger menu doesn’t work.
(iPhone 13)
Otherwise - awesome work
I put together and built a Raycast extension for Anki for this reason: https://www.raycast.com/anton-suprun/anki
Using Raycast keyboard friendly UI makes Anki a lot more fun and friction-less.
If you use a Mac - give it a go.
Apologies if some features are missing - I’ve been procrastinating on patching it with some requested features
The AI Typing Application
This is what I’m trying to do now. Having worked in startups and big tech; I think the best thing one can do is to attempt to forge their own path. For independence, financial gain and sanity
Could expand on this? What advantages in your career? Also, what do you mean by:
> were amateurs, compared to some of the people I hung with, in my free time.
Do you intentionally look to meet people with whom you disagree?
> You might also want to consult a copyright attorney for authoritative advice rather than listen to an internet random like myself.
Yes - sent out a few initial emails to some lawyers that offer a free consultation; let's see if they respond.
Thank you!
I just want to play short snippets of famous songs on the site. 10-20 seconds typically.
> The YouTuber Techmoan has mentioned and respects these limits and plays audio during his equipment tests.
I'll have a look
I learned piano earlier in my life and then learned touch typing (and shameless plug: built https://www.typequicker.com) later on in life and I definitely had a easier time than some of my peers.
I’m curious - what course did you take (might have been a while) ? I’m hoping to built features in TypeQuicker for institutional clients (schools, tutoring agencies, etc) and I’m doing research on what some schools currently use.
Many don’t have any courses at all so it’s a hard sell right now
I think cursive should become more of hobby. Touch typing is so much more important. Wasn’t taught in any of my schools.
I learned touch typing myself and it completely changed my career trajectory and made me a better (digital) communicator/writer
I made https://www.typequicker.com for this reason - hoping to slowly grow it over time and try brining on institutional clients (schools, tutoring agencies, etc). I wish I was forced to learn touch typing earlier on in my life
> Good ones who can’t type fast, I assign them typing lessons their first few paid days on the job, and a half hour twice a week thereafter for a while.
This is very interesting to me - I’ve actually been building https://www.typequicker.com recently and was curious about potentially adding features and marketing it towards businesses who then can use it to train their workers.
Typing quickly is extremely overlooked and since I learned touch typing, it completely improved my productivity and career trajectory. (Went from 40ish to about 100-120wpm depending on what I’m typing)
What are some tools that you use when you say you assign lessons?
Might want to add a bit more to the description.
What do you mean by “search” exactly? Is it just keyword matching across the entire platform?
And when you say YouTube posts, what does this mean exactly?
Also, what if you want to support this type of migration for other payment processors in the future? This name ties to just Stripe.
Also, tiny grammatical nitpick: the subheading should use the word seamlessly, not seamless there I think.
Thank you! I do actually - in the persistance layer, we have a column for which keyboard and keyboard layout was used to type a particular text. However, currently in the front-end/UI we only have an option to use QWERTY.
I have it in my todo list to add additional layouts to front-end. The issue is just that we need a different SVG and correct highlihgting for each key on the keyboard SVG for each layout. So it's very tedious work and time consuming and LLMs are no good with this type of tasks - they struggle with SVGs.
I also have plans to add a layout builder. Users will be able to create their own layouts and practice them with the on-screen keybaord and hands as a guide to help them and avoid looking down.
So my data and API layers support various keyboard and keyboard layouts; all that's left is to make the fronend fixes and add as an
Yes - this is a very, very good point and something I actually spent so much time analyzing how I could implement a solution to this.
I think I spent over a week at one point. I refer to this issue as an off-by one or off-by two inaccuracy. Just as in the example you provided, the user only misses one character but types the rest of the word correctly (however because they missed one, the whole word is not mistyped).
This is indeed a very hard problem and in addition to the example you provided there are many other cases where this type of off-by one (or off-by two) mistyping can occur. At this time, I've put that problem on hold. I tried a few solutions but my friends said the UI was too confusing - the general initial feedback I received is to just keep typing as natural as possible; no stopping a user when they make a mistake, no guard-rails of any kind. Just mimic real typing as much as possible.
Issue is, it's one thing to implement the solution to this but another is how to correctly display this to the user. In essence, the text is just a collection with each character having an index. Per each character we measure everything; milliseconds taken to type, errors made for that character, whether it was corrected or not, etc. But if we're handling off-by one or off-by two, displaying this to the user in a non-confusing way is really hard. UX is hard haha
> 1. Typing uppercase characters counts as a mistake. I'm not sure how that got to be the case, but somehow typing an uppercase letter instead of the lowercase is a mistake, despite the fact that sentences start with a lowercase letter. This conflicts with my muscle memory of starting sentences with a capital letter.
So if you click on the topics (or whatever mode you're on), you will see the Options menu on the side. Capitalization is off by default but you can flip that back if you prefer capitalization. I've had folks request that capitalization be off by default hence the current state but I might change the default settings.
> 2. WPM is not a useful metric on its own
All typing sites generally use the same formula to calculate WPM - the length of the word doesn't matter. Most (pretty much all sites I've tried) sites use this formula: https://www.speedtypingonline.com/typing-equations. By all typed entries it's characters in this case. So it always assumes a length of 5 (avg. word length) and that's how it's calculated acorss all typing sites.
We have VERY detailed metrics. I may add a CPM toggle (toggle between both) but it seems most people prefer WPM as that's what they're used to on other sites.
> measuring three-letter combinations instead of two-letter combinations,
We measure both - see trigrams tab in the stats section.
> Also, as pointed out by another commenter, hands also threw me off. I've been observing them and it's interesting that I don't use my little finger for the left row -- it's used in case I need to press shift.
The hands are mostly there for folks learning correct touch typing practice - it's based on the most recommended general guidance for touch typing. It can be toggled off with the hand-icon button :)
> One piece of feedback and a gripe I have with a lot of these is that missed or extra characters throw off the entire next sequence and essentially require backing up to deal with them, as opposed to wrong characters which are fine to just be mistakes you move on from. It'd be great to have some detection for when the user is continuing that re-aligns their string.
Thank you for the feedback! I’m not entirely sure I can visualize exactly what you mean by this:
> It'd be great to have some detection for when the user is continuing that re-aligns their string.
Could you give an example of this?
I curious because I’ve been exploring alternative and unique UI ideas for typing practice so this could lead me into a new direction
> Dunno about the trigrams though, mostly it's on the "token group" level for me - either the upcoming lookahead feels familiar or it doesn't, and I don't much get bothered by the specific letters as much as "oh I don't have muscle memory on that word, and it's sadly nestled between two easy words, so it's going to be a patchy bit of alternating speed".
Could you elaborate a bit on this part - not sure I fully follow.
The trigrams/bigrams is mostly to help the user discover if there are some patterns that really slow them down or have a lot of mistakes. This is something I wanted that I didn’t see in any other apps.
This also what we use under the hood for SmartPractice weak point identification. We look at what the most relevant character sequences (for example the ta sequence is way more common than za) are and what the user struggles with the most. This is just one of the weak points we use in the user weakness profile.
Yeah, LLMs are indeed really good for this use case.
> That said. I would love to see a middle tier pricing which had some features but avoided the AI use.
Only paid features are AI features. Everything else is free and no ads :)
You can type anything and as much as you want, you have access to all the advanced stats, you can create a custom theme from a photo of your keyboard, etc.
Everything but AI features is free right now. (Might change in future as we’re adding a lot more features so we will definitely consider a mid tier price )
Long-term, passion project of mine - I'm hoping to make this the best typing platform. Just launched the MVP last month.
The core idea of the app is focusing on using natural text. I don't think typing random words (like what some other apps do) is the most effective way to improve typing.
We offer many text topics to type (trivia, literature, etc) where you type text snippets. We offer drills (to help you nail down certain key sequences). We also offer:
- Real-time visual hand/keyboard guides (helps you to not look down at keyboard) - Extremely detailed stats on bigrams, trigrams, per-finger performance, etc. - SmartPractice mode using LLMs to create personalized exercises - Topic-based practice (coding, literature, etc.)
I started this out of passion for typing. I went from 40wpm to ~120wpm (wrote about it here if you're interested: https://www.typequicker.com/blog/learn-touch-typing) and it completely changed my perspective and career trajectory. I became a better programmer and writer because I no longer had to think about the keyboard, nor look down at it.
Currently, we're doing a lot of analysis work on character frequencies and using that to constantly improve the SmartPractice feature. Also, exploring various LLM output testing/observability tools to improve the text generation features.
Approaching this project with a freemium model (have paid AI powered features; using AI to generate text that targets user weakpoints) while everything else in the app is completely free. No ads, no trackers, etc. (Hoping to have sufficient paid users so that we can run the site and never have to even think about running ads).
I've received a lot of feedback and am always looking for ways to improve the site.
Which practice mode did you use?
Capitalization, text length, and topics can be adjusted.
(Just click on the topics buttons or whichever mode you’re using for additional setting).
Try one practice session - see the stats we measure for each text. Each character, every mistype, every millisecond for bigram/trigram, speed and accuracy per hand/fingers, etc.
This is aggregated and we identify weak points over time this way. Then using those weak points we create natural practice text
Spent wayyyy too much time diving deep into building out this algorithm lol. But it works fairly well