Google’s advanced research labs are fond of their moonshot projects. Waymo, which started off as a self-driving car project within the company, is now a separate entity. Google Glass, on the other hand, was a product that was ahead of its time and has now been relegated to industrial use cases. In either case, these ambitious projects tend to have a very long time horizon and so it’s hard to predict whether any particular idea will succeed until it’s been tried.
A new project, called Project Koru, aims to allow you to type without having to look at or even touch a keyboard. This would be an incredible productivity booster if it were to work as intended.
KorU is based on electromyography, a technology that has been used for years to control prosthetic limbs and assist medical diagnoses. Google’s engineers fitted a pair of small sensors on either side of their wrists and used machine learning to map the electrical signals from their forearms and palms to specific key presses.
The chip, described in a paper Google published Wednesday, is small, cheap, and can run complex machine learning algorithms quickly enough to make real-time text entry possible. Google says it can be plugged into common prosthetic limbs and offers a way to improve user control.
It’s still very early in development and there are definitely challenges to overcome, such as learning how to type without feedback from traditional keyboards. Project Koru is also nowhere near ready for release and might never be, but it’s an interesting early look into a possible future where we might interact with computers in entirely new and unseen ways.
[Google AI blog post](https://blog.google/technology/research/project-koru-palm-typing/).
