Americans celebrated July 4 this year as they always do: parades, fireworks, bonfires, parties, movies, and shopping. While the fourth of July savings are always something to celebrate, Apple also (announced) the emergence of new apps to come to the App Store in the near future. New rumors also surfaced about the Cupertino, California company’s next technological inventions.
Fleksy, invented by the company Syntellia, is an application created for the visually impaired (more specifically, the blind). Fleksy is a keyboard application that takes what a blind individual types and autocorrects it to type what he or she wanted it to (even though the individual misses a few letters). While most people assume that this application befits the blind, it also works for the visually apt. Consumers who have little to no eyesight trouble still misspell words and produce typos in emails, documents, and articles all the time. Visually apt consumers still need the Fleksy application if only for correcting misspelled words and typos unseen by the naked eye.
However, Fleksy is more impressive than that. The application not only autocorrects misspelled words, it can produce coherent words and sentences even if you do not type any letter within the vicinity of the word you want to say. In the Fleksy video, the blind man, Taylor Jones, types the letters “f-u-s-c-h-d-d” and the application autocorrects the letters to spell “discuss.” The letters “y-h-t” are autocorrected to spell “the,” and the letters “f-i-n-o-d-n-y” are autocorrected to spell the word “company.”
These words may not seem as though Fleksy is impressive; however, what do you make of Fleksy translating the letters “i-t-e-d-r-h-y-s-t-u-i-h” as “presentation”? I think this makes Fleksy extremely flexible when it comes to discerning the words of blind individuals. She knows what to say, the context of your email, and how to respond to the letters you type.
This app certainly places applications with above-human intelligence; how many humans do you know that could take “gibberish” type and translate it the way Fleksy does? Very few. This app, utilizing Voice technology from Apple, will appear in the App Store soon. I am curious to try this application out, particularly because it is unbelievable that an application can take into account the context of a situation and autocorrect my typed text with the precise verbiage I would type under normal circumstances. A good experiment with this app would be to close your eyes and type on the keyboard.
Another mind-blowing application announced this week is known as Minit, what Brad McCarty from TheNextWeb calls “a video and chatting service.” It is free and available at the App Store. The application runs in landscape mode but not portrait mode (at least for iOS6 beta users at the moment), but it is similar to Facebook in that it is about social networking. You can record videos, but the videos will only record sixty seconds (= 1 minute maximum). When you record a video, you can send it publicly to everyone at the service—or you can send it to your friends on your friends list.
Minit is a visual texting activity that is sure to gather consumers to its service. After all, the app is free and many iOS users are willing to sample free applications in order to give first impressions of developing work. People can now see each other when they send a message without reading a text. There is a benefit to this visual display: users can now interpret properly statements made by someone they are in a conversation with. At times, communication gets confusing and cloudy, and we can say things that have no intention to harm but end up hurting someone. At other times, we can say things that we think clearly communicate but end up confusing others. A text does not always “say it all,” and Minit has certainly taken up the challenge of visual texting. It is a new way of combining video chat and text, functions that we do each day.
Both Fleksy and Minit will allow you to type while on the road en route to a place. However, be careful. With worldwide record temperatures this summer, the last thing you want is to see your iPhone 4s burst into flames while Fleksy and Minit are running smoothly. You may just destroy your phone, lose your iPhone 4s jailbreak, and record an iPhone fire if you are not careful.
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