←back to thread

439 points david927 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.205s | source

What are you working on? Any new ideas which you're thinking about?
Show context
absoluteunit1 ◴[] No.44418988[source]
Building 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(6): >>44419061 #>>44419392 #>>44420907 #>>44426017 #>>44427084 #>>44427663 #
haneul ◴[] No.44419392[source]
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".

replies(1): >>44419673 #
1. absoluteunit1 ◴[] No.44419673[source]
Thank you - glad you liked it and thanks for sharing your impressions and feedback; helps me understand what the users like.

> 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".

Could you elaborate a bit on this part - not sure I fully follow.

The trigrams/bigrams is mostly to help the user discover if there are some patterns that really slow them down or have a lot of mistakes. This is something I wanted that I didn’t see in any other apps.

This also what we use under the hood for SmartPractice weak point identification. We look at what the most relevant character sequences (for example the ta sequence is way more common than za) are and what the user struggles with the most. This is just one of the weak points we use in the user weakness profile.