We’ve tried all sorts of keyboards on our mobiles – the default iPhone one, the incredibly clever Swype one and a host of other cunning keyboard concoctions on various handsets, but none have impressed us as much as SwiftKey.
Now dethroning our previous king of the keypads Swype, the Android-only app manages to predicts our next word with almost disturbing accuracy.
This is down to its intelligent ‘Fluency prediction engine’, which apparently “employs statistical language models generated by analysing billions of words of background text.”
In other words, SwiftKey learns from how you write and tailors itself to your writing style over time.
The more you use it, the better it gets, and the process is now so good that we often find ourselves only having to click out just one letter per word, such is the near-physic accuracy of its predictions.
Not for iPhone users
Sadly, Apple’s restrictions won’t let iPhone users install this fabulous keyboard on their handsets, as the company explained:
We’d love to be on iOS but currently the platform doesn’t allow you to replace the keyboard. Feel free to give Steve Jobs a nudge from us 😉
On offer
SwiftKey is currently on offer for just $1.99 on the Android Market, or you can give it a free month trial.
We thoroughly recommend it.
[SwiftKey]
It’s really excellent isn’t it? And quite disturbing when you type in ‘Fancy’ and the next words it suggest are ‘a’ ‘pint?’
I sometimes just go with the flow and roll with its own suggestions for the words I was going to use. So long as the meaning is the same, I’m happy to get it do all the work 🙂
Still loving the gingerbread keyboard here, I hardly have to look at the screen when typing, will probably give this a go soon. I installed it on my girlfriends tattoo which made it far easier to use than the standard 1.6 keyboard.