alt Hacker NewsBuilding https://www.typequicker.com
Long-term, passion project of mine - I'm hoping to make this the best typing platform. Just launched the MVP last month.
The core idea of the app is focusing on using natural text. I don't think typing random words (like what some other apps do) is the most effective way to improve typing.
We offer many text topics to type (trivia, literature, etc) where you type text snippets. We offer drills (to help you nail down certain key sequences). We also offer:
- Real-time visual hand/keyboard guides (helps you to not look down at keyboard) - Extremely detailed stats on bigrams, trigrams, per-finger performance, etc. - SmartPractice mode using LLMs to create personalized exercises - Topic-based practice (coding, literature, etc.)
I started this out of passion for typing. I went from 40wpm to ~120wpm (wrote about it here if you're interested: https://www.typequicker.com/blog/learn-touch-typing) and it completely changed my perspective and career trajectory. I became a better programmer and writer because I no longer had to think about the keyboard, nor look down at it.
Currently, we're doing a lot of analysis work on character frequencies and using that to constantly improve the SmartPractice feature. Also, exploring various LLM output testing/observability tools to improve the text generation features.
Approaching this project with a freemium model (have paid AI powered features; using AI to generate text that targets user weakpoints) while everything else in the app is completely free. No ads, no trackers, etc. (Hoping to have sufficient paid users so that we can run the site and never have to even think about running ads).
I've received a lot of feedback and am always looking for ways to improve the site.
Replies
This is very neat. One piece of feedback and a gripe I have with a lot of these is that missed or extra characters throw off the entire next sequence and essentially require backing up to deal with them, as opposed to wrong characters which are fine to just be mistakes you move on from. It'd be great to have some detection for when the user is continuing that re-aligns their string.
What an incredibly interesting use of LLMs (generating text to practice typing). It leans in on what LLMs are good at. That said. I would love to see a middle tier pricing which had some features but avoided the AI use.
Hah that's pretty fun. I got tossed about by the animated hands for a few, but grabbed a 194 after that.
Dunno about the trigrams though, mostly it's on the "token group" level for me - either the upcoming lookahead feels familiar or it doesn't, and I don't much get bothered by the specific letters as much as "oh I don't have muscle memory on that word, and it's sadly nestled between two easy words, so it's going to be a patchy bit of alternating speed".
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So I've got some things that seem a little bit weird to me:
1. Typing uppercase characters counts as a mistake
I'm not sure how that got to be the case, but somehow typing an uppercase letter instead of the lowercase is a mistake, despite the fact that sentences start with a lowercase letter. This conflicts with my muscle memory of starting sentences with a capital letter.
2. WPM is not a useful metric on its own
WPM can rise and fall depending on the length of the word. The bigger the word the less likely you are to type that word correctly from muscle memory, so the speed drops. The speed also drops due to the word being longer. I believe having both metrics would yield more useful data, such as when do you slow down etc.
Speaking of which, there are some more statistic things that could help, like measuring how fast you are at fixing the mistakes, or measuring three-letter combinations instead of two-letter combinations, because the context of the third letter might help, but you do need more data to gain a statistically significant result. Maybe trying to classify mistakes by the side of keyboard they happen on -- i.e. are they simple typos or a miscoordination of your hands.
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Also, as pointed out by another commenter, hands also threw me off. I've been observing them and it's interesting that I don't use my little finger for the left row -- it's used in case I need to press shift.