TypingDNA Focus is the first app to predict your mood based on how you type. This AI-based technology is the result of a public research project that began in 2020. And now, with more than 900 participants, over 2 million keystroke events, and over 20 different moods researched, we’re giving you the opportunity to play with the future of typing biometrics.
What moods can you predict?
While this is still an experiment, we’ve been able to train unique deep learning models to predict several moods with very good accuracy. You’ll discover when you’re most focused, tired, stressed, happy, energetic, and calm.
You’ll know how you’re really feeling hour-by-hour, better plan your daily activities, and improve your productivity and mental health.
We also had promising results on other moods including Relaxed, Excited, Dizzy, and Consistent, but we decided to hold off on these until a later time.
How to read the graphs
Each mood has a “normal” level (calibrated for each individual). Anything above that will be a high/positive level, and anything below your normal state would be a low/negative level, showing the absence of that particular mood — potentially even showing the opposite of that particular mood. For example a negative level of stress means you’re probably quite relaxed.
You can also use the Activity tab to see when you were most engaged in typing activities and correlate it to your moods. The “Minutes spent typing” measure stops counting as soon as you stop pressing keys — meaning that it’s not a truly accurate approximation of the total time spent at your computer. For example, you may not be tracking your typing when you’re in a meeting, since you’re likely not typing during that time.
Also, keep in mind that the predictions we make for each hour have better accuracy when there are many typing events during that particular hour. We start showing predictions from 300 characters typed onwards, but the prediction becomes significantly more accurate on 1000+ characters/hour.
How does the AI prediction work?
TypingDNA Focus tracks how you type, not what you type. Running in the background, our AI-based technology will analyze your typing patterns right on your device, so your typing data never leaves your computer.
Whenever you type on your computer, the app analyzes your typing biometrics data in the background and runs mood predictions. We optimized the algorithms to make sure they run smoothly on any computer. However, that means that hourly predictions may sometimes be a little off. It also depends on how much typing occurred in each particular hour.
To keep things simple, we decided not to do any mood predictions if you typed less than 300 characters in a certain hour. However, the values that you’ll see for those hours are estimated based on the previous/next hours.
How accurate are the predictions?
Our predictions are based on real data from real people. We are still a long way from being able to tell your moods with perfection, but if you type like a power user we should already be able to predict your mood with great accuracy. That being said, we’re confident that this is the closest anyone has gotten in predicting moods based on how people type. We also strongly believe that we’ll be able to significantly improve our algorithms in the near future.
In particular, we found that daily predictions are more accurate than hourly predictions, and that some predictions are more long-lasting (e.g. stressed, tired, energized), while others can change suddenly (happy, focused). In reality, your mood will change many times during the day, and our app aims to help you understand how your moods score in various intervals (days, hours).
How does calibration work?
Because everyone types a little differently, we are learning your baseline in the first few hours of using the app, and we keep it updated every day. This calibration tells the app what your normal state for each mood looks like. We use this method to show your moods in the right range in the charts in a way that lets you compare them to your normal state, day-by-day, hour-by-hour, and even compare one mood to another.
How you can help
The mood predictions of TypingDNA Focus improve with each new user. You can join our public research at any time to help have a direct impact on the future of typing biometrics. Since we do not collect your typing biometrics data in the Focus app itself, the only way to help us truly improve this AI technology is to type a few answers in the research app.
Download TypingDNA Focus or sign up for the public research program directly. We can’t wait to hear your feedback!
About TypingDNA: At TypingDNA we primarily develop authentication technologies based on typing biometrics. This is our bread and butter. But with TypingDNA Focus, we’re exploring a brand new space to see just how far typing biometrics technology can go to help society. Unlike with our authentication technology which is proven and battle-tested, Focus is experimental and still being researched. But with your help, the mood predictions will become more accurate every day.
