On desktop, I use the AI-designed Halmak Keyboard, and its had great results.
Rather than manually picking letter positions, Halmak was designed by an evolutionary algorithm, based on a given set of criteria, and sample text.
I designed the original english thumb-key layout manually, with trial-and-error, and based essentially on 3 criteria:
- Letter frequency
- Alternating thumbs
- Thumbs come from the bottom corners, so lower and edge tiles are easier than higher.
But I did not take into account things like digrams / trigrams, and I don’t know enough about evolutionary algorithms to do it.
Would anyone be interested in tackling this problem?
True, its tough to say whether things like having the O and U , on the same key is optimal. We do really need someone to help AI design layouts tho.