14 DAY TRIAL // Typing on a mobile device, be it an Android smartphone or an iPhone, isn’t an easy thing for everyone, especially with Hulk-sized hands.
But this is where keyboard apps come in handy, as they can help not only fix the typing errors automatically but also predict the next words as you type.
All phones come with such a keyboard pre-loaded, and companies like Apple, Google, and Samsung have invested a lot into making them even more advanced to improve their accuracy and prediction engine.
But at the same time, it’s also Microsoft, the company that in 2016 purchased SwiftKey, an already-popular option for those who wanted the best typing experience on Android and iPhone.
Back in 2016, SwiftKey was supporting a little more than 100 languages, and here we are today with the same app offering real-time prediction in no less than 500 languages. The company promised from the very beginning that it would continue investing in SwiftKey’s core strategy, which at that point was expanding its prediction engines to more languages and further improving the experience on both Android and iOS.
“We’ll continue to develop SwiftKey’s market-leading keyboard apps for Android and iOS as well as explore scenarios for the integration of the core technology across the breadth of our product and services portfolio. Moreover, SwiftKey’s predictive technology aligns with Microsoft’s investments and ambition to develop intelligent systems that can work more on the user’s behalf and under their control,” Harry Shum, Executive Vice President, Microsoft AI and Research Group, said four years ago.
Since then, SwiftKey has evolved a lot, and now it’s part of the Windows 10 typing experience as well, as it powers the touch keyboard available in the operating system.
There are over 500 languages that are supported by SwiftKey, and users can enable up to 5 of them at once. And the best of all is that you don’t have to switch from one language to another, as it’s the case of the default iPhone keyboard, for instance, because SwiftKey takes care of everything and automatically detects the language that you type in.
“We’ve enhanced our multilingual support framework to make it even more effective, by constantly scanning input text to estimate which of the enabled languages are being used, and adjusting predictions accordingly,” Microsoft explains.
The statistics available in both the Google Play Store and App Store show just how popular SwiftKey has become in the last few years. On Android, the stable version of SwiftKey has been downloaded by over 500 million times, and these numbers only concerns installs from the Google Play store. Given on Android you can also install apps using the dedicated APK installer, it’s pretty clear that SwiftKey is most likely even more popular than this.
On iOS, the keyboard app has received over 76,000 ratings, with an overall score of 4.7 points out of a maximum of 5.
Needless to say, SwiftKey is set to evolve even more, even though right now, it comes with a pretty compelling feature package. In addition to this super-advanced prediction engine, SwiftKey also bundles other extras, such as theme support and GIF integration.
All of these make SwiftKey one of the first apps that many users install when they set up a new device, no matter if we’re talking about Android or iPhones. And with Microsoft now officially an Android hardware manufacturer, SwiftKey is set to receive even more improvements aimed at new form factors, including for dual-screen devices.