App Review: SwiftKey X keyboard for effortless typing

SwiftKey X is a very clever little app that understands your typing style almost better than you do! At 3.5 megs, it’s quite small for an app that replaces your entire touch-screen keyboard.

SwiftKey X works by smartly predicting your words as you type. This is done by quickly scanning your previous keyboard sessions and quite accurately guessing what words you will type according to your typical style.

As you begin your sentence, words automatically appear. Most of the time, you need not type any more but just select the next word. It’s almost as if your mind and the keyboard have synced and you are now thinking of an entire sentence simultaneously. Telepathy!

Powered by a smarter natural language technology than the standard keyboard, it is almost magical the way this app works. With cloud-based personalization, you may personalize your new keyboard by allowing it to ‘learn’ from your Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and SMS style. There are four funky themes to choose from – dark, light, neon and pumpkin. The pumpkin style is my favourite.

Clicking on the ‘advanced’ tab will allow you to change your typing style, disable or enable your voice recognition key, customize your portrait and landscape key height, as well as enable your swiping gestures. Swiping gestures including when you’ve selected a word accidentally, a simple right-to-left swipe on the keyboard will instantly erase it.

After using the keyboard, you may check out your SwiftKey X stats – your efficiency will be calculated by percentage, and your stats will list the amount of keystrokes saved, typos corrected, words predicted, and words completed. SwiftKey X supports QWERTY, QWERTZ, QZERTY, AZERTY, DVORAK, COLEMAN, Arabic, Bulgarian, Greek, Hebrew, Russian, Scandinavian and Ukrainian layouts. It can be used for more than 30 languages, and can enable up to three languages at once for those who are multi-lingual.

For many, the new keyboard takes some getting used to and sometimes it seems that it is slower than your original. Although your keystrokes are less, and your predicted words are more, the brain seems to want to type, and seems to be quicker at selecting a letter than a word. Because of this misunderstanding, many still prefer the old-school way of typing.

The voice recognition is a very handy feature, but it does not work well at all, jumbling up your sentences entirely. I would suggest that you use the predictive text for input instead. Once you get used to using the new SwiftKey X technology keyboard, typing out sentences becomes a much less painful exercise.

Category: Productivity
Size: 3.5M
Developer: TouchType Ltd
Requirements: Android 2.1 and higher
Price: US$2.99
Content rating: Everyone

By Champ from AppAdvice.co.za