The typing dots.

I have always wondered how this “typing” works. I recently got into an argument with my wife, and she was “typing” and then stopped, and I got worried, and I was like, is she not typing anymore, or is she typing too much? I wanted to know how this “typing” indicator works.

I also make a daily game, Long Story Short, where one news story is cut down to five words. Play today’s

Before the dots

When you talk to someone in person you can see them thinking, and on a phone call you can hear them breathe, but in a text chat there is nothing at all between one message and the next, so you can't tell if the other person is writing you a long reply, has put the phone down to make tea, is annoyed with you, or has simply lost signal.

IBM's white, curved office building at Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, with a road curving up to it, from an IBM brochure — IBM at Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, in a company brochure from around 1982. Cuomo's team was at IBM's site here in 1997. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Where it started

In 1997 a small team at IBM in North Carolina was building a chat window for a multiplayer game, and because they all sat in separate offices they kept shouting down the corridor to ask whether the other person was writing back.

To test the chat, Jerry Cuomo added a line at the bottom of the window that showed what the other person was typing, letter by letter as they typed it, and later he changed that line to say only “Richard is typing…” because, as he put it, he “was tired of hearing people yelling between their offices.”¹

Redrawn from figure 3 of IBM's patent, filed in October 1997.²

Every version showed less

The very first version showed the other person your actual words as you typed them, and since then every new app has shown a little less of what you're doing, until all you see today is three grey dots. Type something below and you'll see what the other person would have seen in each one.

Today’s Long Story Short takes about two minutes. Play it

What the dots actually send

When you touch the first key, even the space bar, your phone sends the other phone a tiny message that says “typing”, and it keeps sending that while you type, but none of your words go anywhere until you press send. So the dots only know that a key was pressed, and they can't tell a one-word reply from a long paragraph that you're about to delete.

Type on the left phone. Each green dot is one “typing” signal on its way across, and your words only travel when you press send.

Your phone

Their phone

The line under their phone is its timer. This one waits 5 seconds after the last signal, like Slack.

IBM's patent drawing shows the two paths it uses. Each key you press sends a small packet that carries only the length of your text, sent the cheapest way the internet has, as a UDP packet that nobody checks arrived, because if one goes missing another is coming a moment later. When you press enter your actual words go the careful way, over TCP, checked and resent until they get there.²

95%

of everything on Microsoft's Messenger servers was people telling each other they were typing.³

A couple of years after IBM, David Auerbach, an engineer at Microsoft, built the same idea into MSN Messenger, partly because on dial-up someone could look online long after their connection had dropped, so the typing signal also told you they were still there. It was sent so often that only about 5 percent of the traffic was actual messages.³

Every app has its own timer

When you stop typing the signals stop, and the other phone waits a while before it takes the dots away, and every app waits a different amount of time. Slack waits 5 seconds after your last key,³ Messenger somewhere between 5 and 10,³ and Discord 10.⁴ On an iPhone it works differently, and WhatsApp has never said how long it waits.

Type a few letters, then stop.

Long Story Short is free, with a new story every morning. Play today’s

Not typing anymore, or typing too much?

On an iPhone the dots don't stay up for as long as someone is writing. In Slate's tests they disappeared about a minute after the person started typing, even when that person kept writing the whole time, and they didn't come back for that message.⁵ When someone deletes everything they've written, the dots go almost at once.⁵ So when the dots vanish in the middle of an argument, she might have deleted it, or she might still be writing something long that your phone has stopped telling you about.

Pick one. The long one takes about a minute and a half to play out.

Her phone

Your phone

1 in 3

posts people started typing on Facebook were never posted.⁶

In 2013 Facebook looked at 3.9 million people over 17 days and found that a third of all the posts people started typing were never posted, and 71 percent of people did it at least once.⁶ Some apps even send the other phone a second signal when you clear the box, and Telegram's own developer notes say it's for when the user “deletes entered text”.⁸

Long Story Short is also on iPhone and Android. Play today’s

61%

more stress when people couldn't see the other person typing at all.⁷

In 2023 researchers at Brown University paired up 24 strangers to solve problems over chat with different kinds of typing indicator, and with no indicator at all people reported 61 percent more stress and 77 percent more frustration than when they could watch the other person's words appear live. Nobody picked “no indicator” as the one they liked best, and one of them said that without it, “I would literally second guess and just be in my own head.”⁷

If you want a break before the last part, today’s Long Story Short is here. Play

Live words today

Today the one place you can watch words appear as they're written is a chat with an AI, where the reply streams in word by word, and Telegram added a setting to its developer tools so bots can do exactly that.⁸

Tap send.

Sources

Jerry Cuomo, “The story of someone's typing”, LinkedIn.
US Patent 5,990,887, Richard Redpath and Gennaro Cuomo, IBM. Filed 30 October 1997, granted 23 November 1999. Figures 3 and 4.
Gizmodo, 2018, interview with David Auerbach. Slack's 5 seconds as Slack gave it to Gizmodo; Messenger from Gizmodo's own tests.
Discord developer documentation, Trigger Typing Indicator: “expires after 10 seconds”.
Slate, 2015; Gizmodo, 2018; BGR, 2026. Apple publishes no figure.
Sauvik Das and Adam Kramer, “Self-Censorship on Facebook”, ICWSM 2013.
Zainab Iftikhar, Yumeng Ma and Jeff Huang, “Together but not together”, CHI 2023.
Telegram API, SendMessageAction: sendMessageCancelAction and sendMessageTextDraftAction.
Photograph: IBM, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, about 1982. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons, “IBM Research Triangle Park Raleigh North Carolina panorama.jpg”.