In the Yandex Keyboard app for Android and iOS, a "neural swipe" has been added — a method of continuous text input using artificial intelligence, which should reduce the number of errors and speed up text input by 30%. So far, "neural swipe" is available only for the Russian keyboard layout.

Swipe (from the English swipe — to hold without tearing off, to slide and type — to print text) is a text input method that allows you to do this on the screen of a smartphone or tablet without lifting your finger. The swipe keyboard is considered to be faster and more convenient, but errors can often occur when using it. Yandex tried to solve this problem using the capabilities of AI.

How does swipe work?

When a user draws a certain curve on the keyboard using swipe input, special algorithms prescribed in advance by programmers are triggered. In Yandex, the neural network was taught to recognize curves entered by people, providing 7 million examples of real swipes for this.

Based on the examples, the neural network will generate new variants of possible swipes, increasing accuracy due to information about the previously typed text, based on the subject of the application in which the input occurs, as well as by selecting the correct endings and cases.

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