How the iPhone keyboard actually works so you can type quickly. It’s almost magic

Now I’ll bring you back to the old schools.

Even 16 years ago, in reviews of the first iPhone, they wrote that the keyboard was surprisingly accurate in correcting typing, and after just a couple of hours of training, errors almost never happened.

Over the years, quality control first increased the distance between smartphones, then swipe support and the recently updated AI model in iOS 17.

But all this can easily be applied to basic technologies that add functionality to the keyboard, but do not make it understandable.

Printed review of the first iPhone from MacRumors, you can read it here

It turns out there are two hidden technologies that make the iPhone so convenient for typing.

They cleverly scan the entire letter we enter, and this finally explains how we can hit tiny buttons so accurately and why the iPhone hated new and non-standard words before the release of iOS 17.

I recently found an ancient artifact, a lost video from Apple itself that revealed two big secrets of the iOS keyboard.

And that’s what was there.

Buttons change size like in games, although they look the same

This is roughly what the keyboard looks like in this particular case: the size of the keys changes with each new letter entered.

The thing about graphical interfaces compared to real-world objects is that the functional interface may not be what it seems.

Apple has masterfully applied this trick to the keyboard.

The size of the buttons changes depending on the numbers you have already typed.

The keyboard decreases or decreases your pressure every time you write a new letter. The experiment system will predict which character will be next and, based on this, generate a new grid that will help print them.

iPhone relies on the entire Russian dictionary and a list of additional words that it remembers as you communicate in your speaking style.

For example, when you write a sentence “checking buttons for accuracy” and stop at “checking the buttons for that[…]» the smartphone will appreciate that after “O” in this case, there will be vowels with minimal protection, but with more agreement.

Then it checks what words there are with these combinations, and based on them, it increases those letters on the keyboard that may remain after consideration “That”.

So, the virtual size of vowels will shrink, and letters like “V”, “h”, “P” And “R” will grow to make it easier for you to hit them. At the same time, visually they found a reasonable form.

The virtual size of the buttons is called a “hitbox,” a term that comes from fighting games.

When opponents strike each other, the game should be considered as such. Animation and interaction are two different processes that are not related to each other.

Player characters from the shot reader’s point of view appear as simple rectangular shapes. A hit is counted if one piece is stacked on top of another. We also use the concept “box”, other words “container”.

To some extent, this method resembles the work of generative models in embryo. When constructing an answer, a new word must rely on several factors, including the wording of the question, the text already written, and the last new word.

But what to do if even in this case you missed and hit the invitation and an unnecessary hitbox?

Here, Apple also backed up, and the solutions contain conclusions from the popular features of push-button phones – T9-style input.

The iPhone also has an advanced T9 built in.

If you wrote early, iPhone will match the proximity of the buttons you entered and select words from a larger set

As you type words, iPhone remembers where you touched your finger. After pressing the spacebar, the resulting set of characters is weighed and tried to combine them and appear with the word that should make sense.

For example, when you enter the word “result” you entered “rehudtat” that is, you didn’t click on “z” And “l” and to those adjacent to them “X” And “d” and they also missed a soft sign.

The iPhone understands that something is wrong, so the buttons next to the ones you entered. From an even larger set of letters, you get what you seem to have in mind.

And all this happens on the fly, and the power for any support is still in the first model.

To some extent, this approach is reminiscent of what push-button phones do in T9 mode.

While I remember how my fingers instantly flew across 9 physical buttons, my parents were amazed at the speed, because I simply trusted the algorithms that accurately returned the right word from the set of entered numbers.

Input T9 is based on an algorithm that gives text selection using only nine keys. The name T9 comes from the English “Textension number enabled 9 keys” or “text on 9 keys”.

This is only part of a larger system

If you look carefully at all the techniques that help us write faster, then one hand is not enough:

And all these cautions instantly.

The key role in converting the result after all the calculations plays the same way as the swiping frequency on the iPhone is twice the frequency of touching the screen to display content.

Such a massive huge operation is passing by our attention.

But if such hidden algorithms are created to make typing easier, there are others in iOS, the goal seems to be somewhere else more insidious.

Read more about how we are hypnotized every time we touch our iPhone here.