Although I used to be the Windows PC guy, in current days I use a Mac as my daily driver. This is more for convenience with the ecosystem of the phone, the tablet and the headphones, I still heavily use Windows and Linux elsewhere.

One advantage to using this OS recently has been an influx in Typing auto-completion software.

The basic idea is simple: as you type, the predicted next word appears on screen, and you hit tab to accept it. In some cases, you can keep tapping tab and it will complete the sentence you were already trying to write.

The best comparison is typing a website you have visited before into your browser’s address bar. You start typing, and the browser “knows” what you probably meant and fills in the rest..

This is particularly useful if you type a lot. Writers, bloggers, people who send endless emails, legal teams, support teams, and plenty of others could benefit from this kind of tool. It could also be useful from an accessibility point of view, especially for people who struggle with typing but find voice dictation too slow, awkward or inaccurate.

The software uses artificial intelligence to understand what is being typed and predict what should come next. As we know, this is essentially how LLMs work: predicting the next word based on context. The difference here is that the AI model runs locally on the system, so the suggestions are quick, private and available as you type.

I initially used CoTypist, which was in public beta free-use for some time, which worked pretty well, but unfortunately it was moved to a subscription model, and I have a very strong opinion about those, and so does reddit.

Since then, with it’s popularity and with people clearly wanting the concept to continue, several developers have brought their own versions. A very prompt response from the community was CoTabby, which has gained rapid development, however I wasn’t able to get it fully working on my machine, but that was likely user error.

Currently, I’m using the open-source software KeyType, which as of writing is at version 1.4. Personally, I don’t need extra fluff and features around this core autocomplete function, so this has been a win for me. The install was simple, download, pick a local AI model to download, let it run and reboot the mac (reboot may not be necessary for others).

There are some mild bugs, such as when multiple words are suggested, repeatedly mashing tab will continue the sentence, but spaces between the words sometimes don’t show up. I’m hoping that will be fixed in future versions, but in the meantime shift+tab completes the sentence.

This may also be specific to my setup, but I have noticed the suggestions do not always appear next to the text. They do not seem to anchor properly to the cursor, although that may be the WordPress online editor being awkward rather than KeyType itself.

It does look like the software is in rapid development so these issues may age very quickly. We might also see this sort of functionality baked into the Operating System in the future, but for now, I’ll take it.

A lot of content and apps are fairly described as “AI slop”, but this feels different. This is a genuinely useful tool for getting work done faster. It is not really about AI thinking for you. It is more like AI thinking with you, where you are still steering the sentence as you go.