SwiftKey, the Android keyboard replacement that can just about read minds, has passed a pretty significant milestone -- 5,000,000 downloads. Just as impressive, over 1,000,000 users have personalized their install using SwiftKey's service to scan your mail and social media posts to learn how you type. The folks at TouchType aren't just awesome developers though, they like to share the good fortune. To celebrate, they have updated the core language data to help make "informal language" easier to type on our phones, and are offering a 25 percent discount on the apps normal $3.99 / £2.49 asking price! The sale is only good through the weekend.
Here at AC more than a couple of us use SwiftKey, and we're looking forward to the update. The weekend sale is a great way for anyone who's not using SwiftKey to find out what all the fuss is about. The press release and a download link are after the break.
SwiftKey Updates Languages to Make it Quicker and Easier to Type
The World’s Most Downloaded Premium Android Keyboard Passes Milestone of 5 Million Downloads and One Million Personalizations
New Users Can Get 25 Percent off SwiftKey This Weekend
London, UK – February 17, 2012 -- SwiftKey, an award-winning smart keyboard for Android that understands how words work together to give better predictions and corrections, has updated its core language data to make typing informal messages easier (http://www.swiftkey.net).
The update is available for free to current users, and to celebrate the milestone, this weekend new users can buy SwiftKey for 25 percent off the retail price, normally $3.99 / (£2.49)
“The technology behind SwiftKey has been developed so that we’re able to innovate quickly and rapidly develop new features and improvements,” Dr Ben Medlock, CTO, said. “Responding to user demand, we’ve now updated our language models to make it easier to use informal language with SwiftKey, making it faster at completing and correcting messages being sent to family and friends.”
SwiftKey, which is nominated for Most Innovative Mobile App at this year’s Global Mobile Awards held at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, is unique in that it creates a truly personal language model based on a user’s historic typing, SMS, social media and email accounts. The more a user personalizes SwiftKey, the better and faster the keyboard becomes at correcting and predicting their individual text input.
“We’ve had impressive consumer downloads of SwiftKey in the last year, reaching the No.1 top paid app position in the Android Market,” Medlock continued. “It’s significant that we’ve also now passed one million personalizations, showing the strong consumer demand for a personalized typing experience.”
SwiftKey can be downloaded from Amazon Market and Android Market. See http://www.swiftkey.net/
Reader comments
SwiftKey passes 5 million-installs milestone, celebrates with an update and a sale
first! (to download it)
Best keyboard on the market IMO
Yup.
SwiftKey is great, but it took me two minutes to uninstall because it lacks what I use the most: CUSTOM AUTO-TEXT.
How can a keyboard these days not have that?!?! it's been in dinosaur land of BlackBerry for ages, so you can't argue this is a 'new feature'...
I like Auto-Text too. But with SwiftKey's freakishly accurate predictions I don't miss it. More often than not, I type two/three letters, SwiftKey correctly predicts the word and the next 2 or 3 words after that (sometimes entire sentences).
How about when you want to enter weird symbols? Or long sentences like "in my humble opinion" instead of IMHO when writing formal messages... My most used shortcut is for the " ¬¬ " 'smiley' and some other stuff that autocorrect or prediction just wouldn't catch...
Just hold down the "enter" key for smilies!
But there's no smiley for "¬¬" or the custom phrases I use the most... Don't get me wrong, the keyboard is great and the prediction borders on psychic, but AutoText is a great feature to have (and in my case, a deal breaker if not present... so, at least for now, I'm sticking with Smart Keyboard)
No dude, you should just do it their way, cause you're wrong and they're right.
Obviously AutoText is worthless because SwiftKey can predict that you want to do that smiley before you even know it.
¬¬' (hehehe no pun intended) And yeah, I get the amazing prediction... but I still need my AutoText. Call me old fashioned...
Did you try it long enough to have it poll your text messages, FB, Twitter, Google, etc.? It picks up on predictions based on what you've already typed and does a damn good job of it.
Smart Keyboard Pro >
Look how wrong you are, it's adorable.
I also use Smart Keyboard... themes for it are way better and varied :)
SwiftKey is awesome but it still BADLY needs an ICS theme.
ICS theme is in the works. Swiftkey VIP members got to vote on their favorite one last week.
They are working on it. See this post about it on their Google+ page:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/104673797745951113580/posts/WEn8N2M19CY
I still think they should allow custom themes like for Smart Keyboard or Go Keyboard...
Has AC dived into the fray with a serious and detailed comparo of all of the 3rd party keyboards? Now that Swype is available for ICS, it would make sense to do that.
They did a comparo a couple of years ago IIRC when SwiftKey was in its original beta, but they could probably stand to do an updated version. I was in that beta and as a result got to buy it for $1 when it went gold and got the upgrade to SwiftKey X along with it. Whenever it's a free app at Amazon or on sale, I usually post it on my Facebook to bully my friends into getting with the program.
After you let it learn from your accounts and use it a while, it gets downright psychic in its predictions. When I have to type more than three characters to get a prediction I wonder what's wrong with it; it usually has my next word as an option on the first letter. Wild!
Perfect Keyboard is the best!
I liked the idea of SwiftKey but the actual keyboard is too small and there isn't an option to make it bigger. I will give it another shot once that is possible.
It does have two size options (big and small); maybe yours is set to 'small'? But yeah, not as customizable as, I think, in Perfect Keyboard (in Smart Keyboard you set the height, I guess it's the same for you)
Couldn't agree more. I love Perfect Keyboard.
My favorite