The system learned to translate brain activity to physical intent after just 30 sentences. Typing speeds reached 22 words per minute with few errors, nearly matching speeds of able-bodied smartphone users.
The system learned to translate brain activity to physical intent after just 30 sentences. Typing speeds reached 22 words per minute with few errors, nearly matching speeds of able-bodied smartphone users.
An awesome development no doubt, but, 22 wpm is ssslllloooow
Edit: to be clear, 22wpm is huge for people who were previously unable to type at all, or with any sort of speed. Just weird to call 22wpm “nearly as fast as smartphone users”. (And I know, they’re using smartphone users of that patticular age group as the metric, but the headline is dishonest by omission in this case)
As someone with fat fingers and autocorrect disabled, I wish I had 22 wpm with high accuracy.
And before you suggest autocorrect, I use a lot of acronyms and jargon that autocorrect often fails at. It gets annoying enough that I’d rather just type stuff out myself.
Fair enough! I don’t use autocorrect either, but I guess I don’t have the same problem with my fingers that you’re experiencing.
I just can’t fathom it taking me nearly three seconds to type a word. I’d be surprised if the majority of words take me even one second to type.
I love to type fast, but I recognise it’s not as valuable as typing something worth reading. I used to write long emails and it was never really worth a damn in the end. As for writing books, those aren’t the kind of thing you should just firehose onto the page either.
Sure but we’re not talking about what’s being typed, rather how fast you can type it.
Yeah but like… This is a post about people who couldn’t type at all before. Even 22WPM is a massive quality of life boost, and all I’m saying is that even such a modest speed unlocks pretty much all of the contributory ability a strong typist has (and that slower isn’t always worse).
Oh for sure! But them saying that 22wpm is “nearly as fast as smartphone users” is what I’m calling out. This is an enormous improvement for the people who it affects!