1. The letters stay where you know them
Flikzi’s letters are in the QWERTY rows of ten, nine and seven. Your thumbs already know where t and h are, and nothing about that changes.
It wasn’t always so. Until late 2026, Flikzi’s test builds had fewer, bigger keys with several letters on each. Typing on them was never fast enough, so the letters went back to the places thumbs already know, and the new ideas moved into the flicks and the autocorrect.
2. No gaps, and the nearest key wins
Hexagons fit together like a honeycomb, with no space between them. Flikzi doesn’t test your touch against key outlines. It sends every touch to the key whose centre is closest, so there is no border to fall on and no gap to fall into.
Each row sits half a key further in than the row above, so every letter has six neighbours. QWERTY rows are staggered like this already: a sits between q and w, and on Flikzi z sits between a and s, as on a computer keyboard. The keys are a little taller than a regular hexagon, which leaves room for the digit or mark under each letter and keeps the rows further apart.
3. An autocorrect that reads the touch
A thumb doesn’t land on a point. It lands on a patch, a little off-centre. So Flikzi doesn’t only note which key you hit. It notes where the tap landed and weighs the keys around it: a tap between o and p counts for both, and the words before it decide. It also allows for a missed letter, an extra tap and two letters swapped.
- It learns your thumbs. If you always land a little low on one key, or your taps scatter widely, Flikzi learns that from the words you finish. It keeps a few numbers per key, on your phone, and no text.
- Your letters stay as typed until you press space. The strip above the keys shows first what space will use.
- It puts back a missed space. Type thequick and space gives you the quick.
- It looks back one word. When the next word shows what the last one was, the last one is respelled: well be becomes we’ll be, its going becomes it’s going.
- It runs on the phone. Nothing you type is sent anywhere to be corrected.
We measured it with a simulated typist: a program that types English sentences with taps that scatter round each key and with slips (a missed letter, an extra one, two swapped). The sentences were kept out of the word list.
| Simulated typing | Words wrong as typed | Right after space | In the first three words |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light: about 1 slip in 100 letters | 9% | 99.0% | 99.7% |
| Normal: about 2 slips in 100 letters | 43% | 97.0% | 98.9% |
| Heavy: about 4 slips in 100 letters | 71% | 92.8% | 96.8% |
65,351 English words from 8,000 sentences, with nothing learned along the way. Of the words that were typed right, about 4 in 1,000 were changed to something else.
We also had the simulated typist leave out one space in twenty. At normal typing, 74% of those spaces were put back when it pressed space (90% when every letter was hit exactly), and 5 words in the 65,351 were split in two that shouldn’t have been.
4. Flicks instead of extra keys
A standard keyboard spends keys on shift and backspace, and hides the digits on another layer. On Flikzi those are gestures on keys you are already touching:
- Flick a letter up for its capital.
- Flick it down for the digit or mark drawn under it.
- Swipe the space bar left to delete, and right to bring it back.
With shift and backspace out of the rows, ?123 and emoji sit at the ends of the middle row, the comma, full stop and enter keys beside the bottom letters, and the space bar gets a row to itself. See every gesture.
5. Mistakes that undo
- A correction you didn’t want undoes. Delete straight after it and your own letters are back, and they aren’t corrected again.
- Every delete undoes. Swipe right on the space bar to restore what you deleted.
- It remembers what you insist on. A word you put back or pick from the strip becomes one of your words.
- You can switch it off. The Autocorrect switch in settings stops the changing and keeps the suggestions.
What we haven’t measured yet
We haven’t published a study with real thumbs on Flikzi. The figures above come from a simulated typist, and its mistakes are the kind the autocorrect expects, so real typing will come out worse than the table. We also haven’t compared Flikzi with other keyboards on the same typing. When we run a study with people, we’ll publish the numbers here, whatever they are.
The table is for English, which is the strongest. In the same simulation at normal typing, fourteen of the other languages came out between 92% and 96% right after space, Polish 90%, Turkish and Finnish 87%, and Vietnamese 79%. Their word lists lack more of the words people write, and words that differ only by an accent or a tone are harder to choose between.
Glide typing has been tried with a simulated finger only, so we quote no figure for it here.
Fewer taps, too
The flicks that replace the extra keys also save taps: a capital is one flick, a digit is one flick, and deleting is one swipe. See every gesture, or the taps-saved table.