The origin story of the QWERTY keyboard layout is a very particular, very nerdy sort of mythology. There was a guy with a typewriter patent in the 1800s, but he probably didn't come up with it. More likely, it developed as telegraph operators used typewriters to transcribe messages in Morse Code, and moved the keys around to better suit their needs.
The actual story matters less than the overarching point: This thing is OLD. Which makes it all the more remarkable that this century-old technology is still the primary way we communicate. Sure, instead of clacky typewriters and ink-stained fingers we're poking at touchscreens and getting Doritos crumbs in our laptops, but we're still using the same 26 letters in the same order as we ever have.
That's not to say there's no innovation happening in keyboards. The keyboard app market is booming, with new ideas about text input popping up everywhere. Most are attempting to solve the typing experience, like Swype, or make predictive and corrective text better, like SwiftKey. A few let you speak in Lil' Wayne lyrics or flirt in pre-populated pickup lines. Some exist only to make your keyboard look like a rainbow's vomit. But a few are trying to take the three rows we've been using since time immemorial, and make something more of them.
Take Slash, for instance, a new iOS app launching today: It's part keyboard app, part corraler of links and information. At the bottom of the keyboard, there's a big black forward-slash; when you tap it, you open up a handful of mini-search engines that you can use without having to leave the keyboard. The Slash team thinks of the app as a mobile-first search engine, and they're connecting with partners and APIs like Foursquare, Spotify, and Google to surface information as you need it. Type "/spotify the weeknd" to find a song, or "/foursquare diner" to look for places—pick one from the search results that pop up and a link shows up in the text box. There's no copying and pasting, no complicated share menus. Everything happens within the keyboard itself. It all works within the QWERTY setup, too, in an app that looks almost exactly like the keyboard that comes with your iPhone.
Rather than try to reinvent the wheel like, say, Minuum—which any Dvorak devotee will tell you is a fool's errand—the Slash team took the existing interface and added to it. "Knowing that people have a pretty low threshold for change in these extremely familiar situations," says Slash cofounder Nick Barr, "we wanted to start from the keyboard and then figure out how to go from there."
Way back when, Slash was conceived as a messaging app, a sort of platform for you to get everything done with chat windows. But CEO Cem Kozinoglu worried that many of the services he hoped to integrate—Facebook, Google, Instagram—would see Slash as a competitor and cut off access. "I had to find a way to bypass that," Kozinoglu says, "and somehow find a Trojan horse which wouldn't have the issue of getting shut down." He started poking around, and came across "pretty much the only piece of software that's between your operating system and your apps." The keyboard.
The power of the keyboard interface is twofold. One, it's everywhere; on either iOS or Android, you can fully replace the system keyboard so that every time you tap in a text box, the app of your choosing appears. No other app type has anything close to that much intrusive power on your experience. Second, the keyboard is where just about everything begins—messages, requests, commands. If a developer can get in on that ground floor, they can provide more useful information even more quickly.
But with great power comes great...regulation. Apple in particular makes it difficult to build a good, intelligent keyboard. It won't let you see what your friend is typing, or upload much of anything to the cloud for processing. Then there's the installation process, equal parts hard and horrifying. "Apple gives people a pretty scary warning when you require access," Kozinoglu says. On Android, too, where developers have even more leeway, there's reason to be wary of installing what amounts to a sanctioned key logger. Slash promises to be careful with its privacy policy, though, and says the limitations on the information and context it can access have kept its efforts focused.
"Slash really came out of the whole idea of a command line," Kozinoglu says, "of having the whole interface connected." You wouldn't have to bounce between different apps and interfaces, you could get everything done just by typing and grabbing the information you need as you go.
"When you think about a word," Barr says, "a word is a means to an idea." It sounds like a lot of philosophizing for a guy who makes a keyboard app, but it's a core part of the team's logic. Typing words is a means to an end—the end is the point. You want to tell someone how you feel, what you're up to, or about that crazy thing you just saw. What if there were other ways to get there than choosing among those 26 letters?
Emoji are probably the most prevalent alternative, and a batch of emoji-first keyboard apps have sprung up to make sorting through them easier. The Emoji> app has more than 45 million users, all of them using big stickers and goofy faces to communicate and even play games with each other. Using Slash, you can send super-specific reaction pics just by typing "/sticker obama," and choosing among the results: sad Barack. Happy Barack. Barack kissing Mitt Romney. Barack grinning creepily with DAT ASS written above his head. There's also a Giphy search engine built in, which will almost certainly lead to the complete disuse of the human language if Slash is adopted broadly.
If the goal is to replace words with something more directly useful, there's a lot more a keyboard can do. Earlier this year, Sunrise Calendar released an app called Meet, which is essentially a time-picker for scheduling meetings. Inside any app, just pull up this "keyboard" (in quotes because it's not really a keyboard, it's just there in place of a keyboard) and pick the times you have free. A web page gets made, a link gets pasted into your message, and voilà: you've scheduled a meeting.
Now, what if your phone could automatically know you were trying to schedule a meeting, and pick some times for you? That's what Slash eventually hopes to do. Since it's a keyboard, it knows what you're typing as you go—so as soon as you tap out "have you listened to..." Spotify can be looking for the song you're referencing.
"This is just the evolution of prediction," Barr says. He hopes Slash will stop you from having to leave conversations to ask Siri for something, or go look up some info before coming right back to share it. As you're typing, Slash will figure out what you need and provide it in a neat row right about your letter keys. "We think of it as sort of the inception of intention, where ideas are born."
There are lots of search apps, and everyone has Spotify a tap or two away anyway. So who cares about having it in the keyboard? "What they're not solving is this problem of in-line intelligence, " Barr says. "You and I are suspending our conversation so I can go talk to Siri. And people will talk to robots, but they'd rather talk to each other."
Because most of the work is done server-side (the app is just a keyboard, remember), the Slash team can update it quickly and invisibly. They're working on more partnerships, as well as integrating every public API they can get their hands on. A few minutes before we spoke, Kozinoglu had just finished and released a Product Hunt integration, so you can share trending products right from your keyboard. ("Since we're going live," Barr laughs, "we need to appease the Product Hunt gods.")
Slash is among the first of its kind, but it won't be the last. We've built so much power and functionality into these pocket-computers-thingies we call phones, and now the race is on to find ways to connect it all together. To make it available when we need it, where we want it. And it's hard to get closer than to be right under our thumbs. QWERTY ain't going anywhere, but typing might never be the same.
