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SwiftKey - a less talked about keyboard

T

ttamnedlog

Android Enthusiast
SwiftKey - Revolutionary text prediction for smartphones

They mailed out the new beta today. Anybody been using this?

It's no multitouch or swiping keyboard, and much like Swype, is in limited beta. UNLIKE Swype, it has practically no buzz around it. So for the many of you who probably don't know, this keyboard is a new kind of predictive keyboard. Instead of predicting the word you are typing, it predicts the NEXT word you'll be typing. Sometimes it manages to completely guess the word on its own, sometimes you have to begin typing a letter or two.

I've used it for maybe... 10 minutes? Way too early to pass judgment of course, but so far I can see how it could get ridiculously fast once you get used to it. It has usage stats, and it says that I've saved 317 keystrokes, making me 38% more efficient.

Personally, I'm a bit of a long-winded and verbose texter. You could pick any number of sentences from this post and they would match my texting style exactly. So this keyboard will have an understandably tough time predicting what I will say, as I follow no real pattern.

But for those of you who don't type novels for texts, I can see this keyboard REALLY speeding things up.
 
ttamnedlog said:
SwiftKey - Revolutionary text prediction for smartphones

They mailed out the new beta today. Anybody been using this?

It's no multitouch or swiping keyboard, and much like Swype, is in limited beta. UNLIKE Swype, it has practically no buzz around it. So for the many of you who probably don't know, this keyboard is a new kind of predictive keyboard. Instead of predicting the word you are typing, it predicts the NEXT word you'll be typing. Sometimes it manages to completely guess the word on its own, sometimes you have to begin typing a letter or two.

I've used it for maybe... 10 minutes? Way too early to pass judgment of course, but so far I can see how it could get ridiculously fast once you get used to it. It has usage stats, and it says that I've saved 317 keystrokes, making me 38% more efficient.

Personally, I'm a bit of a long-winded and verbose texter. You could pick any number of sentences from this post and they would match my texting style exactly. So this keyboard will have an understandably tough time predicting what I will say, as I follow no real pattern.

But for those of you who don't type novels for texts, I can see this keyboard REALLY speeding things up.
Click to expand...

Saw this over at droid-life, its not to shabby of a keyboard, but i'll stick with swype for now, thanks for posting it tho, its true, it needed more advertising...
 
Looks awesome. Did you just sign up to recieve it? Iuse the droid x keyboard but not for the multi touch. I just like it better.
 
Yeah I signed up a week or two ago. They just sent out the new wave today. I'm not sure if that means you can still sign up and get it or if signing up allows you to get the NEXT version.
 
Tried it several weeks ago. It's a neat idea. Kinda freaks you out sometimes how it "knows" the next word so often. I just couldn't quite get used to looking up at the words all the time. Cool concept tho. Might give it another shot.
 
Just did an informal test of: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."

1. Smart Keyboard Pro - 7s
2. ShapeWriter - 9s
3. SwiftKey - 18s

I of course am still not used to SwiftKey yet, plus I don't think I've ever typed that sentence so that kinda defeats the way SwiftKey works haha. But as I mentioned in the first post, I don't really have patterns to the way I type. I think that will be SwiftKey's Achilles heal for me.
 
After having used it for a day, I just type too verbosely for it to benefit me all that much. Every now and then I'll type a sentence that it can fly through, but usually I'm typing out most of the words and constantly double checking it.

It just hasn't even come close to competing with Shapewriter for portrait or Smart Keyboard Pro for landscape.

A for effort though!
 
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