For anyone who is not familiar with SwiftKey, the company was founded in 2008 by Jon Reynolds and Dr Ben Medlock with over 100 staff based in the company’s head office in Southwark, London. It’s a great little third-party keyboard app which allows users to change from their default keyboard on either their Android or iOS device, to one which is extremely efficient. This is primarily down to its artificial intelligence which allows it to very accurately predict the next word the user intends to type.
Over the last year, there have been many updates to the app improving many aspects, and today the company have announced yet another centred around efficiency and performance. The company say that the attention of the update has been focused around how quickly the keyboard loads on screen, while also making sure that when users have finished using the keyboard, it also disappears quicker too. In addition, users can also expect much better improvement when switching between fields, and most importantly, when typing, the responsiveness has been greatly improved.
SwiftKey have provided some stats about the performance update, they say that the keyboard should appear around 15-20% faster than the previous version, while leaving the screen about 20-30% faster. The typing responsiveness has been improved by around 10-18%, resulting in a much smoother typing experience on screen. SwiftKey have also assured users that more enhancements are promised in future updates as well.
Finally, the new version of SwiftKey has also added support for 12 additional languages: Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Nepali, and Sinhala. This means that SwiftKey now supports a total of 81 languages – pretty impressive indeed.
Some of you may be aware that another third-party keyboard app named “Fleksy” bragged yesterday about how it has been certified the fastest keyboard app in the world for typing, as certified by the Guinness World Records. But, with the ever increasing feature list and performance improvements, it’s quite possible that the developers of SwiftKey will be looking to take that record sometime in the future, I’ll guess we’ll have to wait and see.