prediction feature for the keyboard

[Björn Martensen]

Hi,

I just thought about something which I saw in an iphone video from apple
a while back which was about the prediction feature in their keyboard.
They make the area for the key which is likely to be pressed next bigger
while keeping the size of the graphics the same of course, but it's less
likely that you press an "r" when this letter is not common in words
after a certain letter, so they make the area which recognizes the
finger input as an "e" bigger and reduce the size for "r", "w" and so
on.

This shouldn't be too hard, right? I mean, dasher has somewhat the same
approach, but while the iphone only does this for english (iirc), dasher
would provide this feature for much more languages.
So my idea was to have the graphics stay the same all the time (with
effects for pressed keys and such of course, but the same of the keys
stay the same visibly) and have some kind of invisible second layer
which represents the input areas. These areas change their size all the
time. Dasher does this already, as it makes the areas for the next
letter to be written larger and reduces the size of unlikely to be
written letters.
Is it somehow possible to get the "likelyness" of the next letter to be
written (and even the ones after that, es dasher even recognizes words)
from dasher and use this information to dynamically change the size of
the input areas?

Maybe this can be integrated into raster's keyboard, as I heard it's
pretty usable with finger input already, but this should be able to make
it even better as input errors would be reduced.

This should work fine for email, im, sms and such, but might be a
problem in a terminal, as you don't really write words here. So it might
be better to turn it off for the terminal, while using the devices
locale for the other language to be used for prediction in the other
use-cases. Maybe an option to set the prediction-language for the
keyboard would be nice too, as I for example like to keep my system
using an english locale but write sms, emails and im in german.

What do you think about this idea?

greets,
Björn
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