🗺 Keyman Roadmap - September 2023

We have just updated our Keyman Roadmap. Please give your feedback for upcoming versions of Keyman 18 and 19 here!

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Thank you for sharing your roadmap so openly. The bits that I understand look very good.

You call it a “small feature” but we are drooling over this detail:

Lexical models: We plan to offer fine grained control over short (1-3 letter) suggestions to lexical model developers.

At present we only even have items with four characters or more in our model. Some users are fluent in Gboard and can handle, where “nothing useful” is being proposed. But some team members are concerned that new users might be mislead when nothing comes up for short words:

Example:
We have two valid words: nɖe and nɖee and depending on context and grammar, users need to type one or the other. So a new user might need nɖe but only sees a proposal of nɖee and might come to the wrong conclusion, that an extra final e is always needed on this word.

At present, we only propose words with 4 or more characters because we have got an overwhelming amount of short words in our dictionary. And personally I find it distracting, when a robot kicks in before I have even typed three characters at the beginning of any word. It would just uselessly fluctuate with each keystroke.

So, I do not know what you are preparing, but I trust that it will be helpful with the shorter words. Thank you.

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