Why Smarter Models Make Worse Keyboards
Neural models get the hype. But that lightning-fast word suggestion as you type? That's not a neural model. It's a lookup table. And it's beating transformers on the metric that matters.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about prediction under pressure.
When I was working on Indian-language typing for early Kindle devices, we had a problem that no amount of ML enthusiasm could solve: the hardware simply didn't care about our ambitions. We had roughly 512 MB of RAM, zero connectivity, and a hard wall of 10 ms per keystroke. Miss that deadline, and the keyboard felt broken — even if it was technically correct.
Neural models weren't an option. So we built something that worked: a character-level n-gram system that turned prediction into pure lookup. No inference. No floating point math at runtime. Just precomputed transitions and a ranking table.
का -> [म, र, ह]
It was fast....
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