Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly does swiftkey offer over the usual keyboard? A quick google seems to bring up "better predictive text" and "better multi-language support" - is that it?
I mean, you say "is this it?", but the multi-language support of literally all other Android keyboards I've used are basically unusable. Take Google's default keyboard, it requires you manually switch languages for swiping and predictive text to work. But that's completely unworkable for the way multi-lingual people end up actually typing texting. I swap back and forth across languages, even if just for 1 or 2 words and having to explicitly toggle languages is a MAJOR speedbump in typing.
Swiftkey just lets me auto-complete/swipe in multiple languages seamlessly. Want to swipe 1 English word inside a completely Dutch sentence? No problem. The reverse? No problem. Using Google's keyboard the same way is endlessly frustrating.
What do you mean when you say "Google's keyboard"? I use Gboard and frequently swipe sentences which mix Spanish and English just fine. You enable "Multilingual typing" on the specific keyboard and then tick off languages from other installed keyboards to enable them. Maybe you haven't tried gboard for a long time?
There's some internal matrix of "Supported" clean movement, mostly between languages with an extensive shared vocabulary. You can enable Multilingual Typing theoretically anywhere, but it only really "works" among languages that share a layout and character dictionary.
But if you need to loanword a non-common word from English into another language (e.g. Hebrew), Gboard just can't do it. If you change character sets, you change entire dictionaries. SwiftKey has a unified dictionary among all languages and makes a best guess approximation based on the current language selected and then tries the other languages you have configured.
This means that if you're going along in, say, French, but then need to reference a word in Hebrew, you can swipe over to Hebrew, bang out a word, then swap back to French, type words in English (which get autocorrected in english) and then continue in French. This isn't really feasible in Gboard without a lot of back and forth.
Maybe Google updated the Gboard since the last time you used it, but it definitely predicts from multiple languages in the same sentence for the last couple of months at least.
The default one on Samsung will let you select multiple languages under "Suggest text predictions". Not sure if that's a clone of the default Google one, but I had so far assumed so. Seems to switch decently between Dutch and English, for me.
Yeah. Though decently is not the same as excellently.
Written on a SwiftKey keyboard used to write English, Swedish, Danish and Icelandic with minimal issues.
Though to be fair, I think the stock keyboard is probably almost as good these days and that the difference is that my SwiftKey keyboard has been trained on my writing for several years.
Though I have no idea more than that I quickly get annoyed when I try to type on the stock one.
I use GBoard with both English and Spanish installed, and I don't have to manually switch anything to swipe in both languages, or get predictive text in both languages.
The predictive text combined with the predictive autocomplete are so good that they changed the way I type on my phone. I don't even need to hit the right letters anymore, the need for precisions has disappeared almost completely. This has massively sped up typing on my phone. There's also a wide variety of customisations (including an easy height slider and several input modes that you can adjust to any device) that many competing keyboards lack.
This is very obvious when I need to type on someone else's device or when I try other keyboards. They do similar things, each in their own way, but just don't do it quite so well as SwiftKey does it.
Since Microsoft bought the app I've stopped logging into it with an account (so reinstalls and new phones mean I need to retrain the keyboard) and have taken away the internet permission so it can't do any creepy stuff like send telemetry. Somehow Bing found itself into the keyboard, probably an automatic update I forgot to turn off in the Play store.
The addition of Bing is just one more sad step in the development of the app I probably use most on my phone. I switched to SwiftKey exactly because I didn't trust Google's Gboard and now all this Cortana 2.0 crap is making the keyboard just as bad as the one I dropped years ago.
Curious about that. I don't exactly like Microsoft, but them buying it made me trust it more with my data than some random small company. I expect MS to have routines around data security and they they have very little incentive to use my data in illegal ways, eg try to sniff my passwords or something like that. So with MS owning it, I trust more that they don't store text written in password fields (and it never suggests any of my passwords) than if it's some small company that I've never heard of and making a keyboard without a clear way of monetizing it (though I'd absolutely pay quite a lot for SwiftKey).
If I have to enter passwords I use Keepass' keyboard, also because I store them in that password manager and its keyboard has one User and one Password key. I switch with a small button to the right of Android's back button.
Swiping and the features you mentioned are amongst the best I've tried. So yes, it's a "better" "usual" keyboard that makes me type more efficiently than other keyboards. E.g. Gboard doesn't come close and feels like a big downgrade.
Fast edit: it's Monday morning, I didn't realise there were so many other replies already.
I'm someone who switched from SwiftKey (paid plan) to GBoard, and never looked back. I much prefer GBoard to SwiftKey. So it might be a matter of preference
Really? I hope you're right, I'm looking for a better alternative than SwiftKey, but I haven't found any yet. I'll try GBoard again now, thanks.
EDIT: It's good, but not as good as Swiftkey in its UX. Swiping for punctuation doesn't work, you need to long press and swipe. Pressing space to insert the prediction and then pressing comma doesn't remove the space, so it requires an awkward dance to insert a comma and a prediction simultaneously. There's no gesture to dismiss the keyboard, the "delete word" swipe is a bit awkward, long pressing buttons doesn't give you punctuation, and that's just what I've found in a few minutes of use. I hope they address these soon.
Ah. These days I just use speech to text, with a combination of swiping sometimes and tapping for punctuation.
I also don't to use my phone much anymore (since I reduced social media usage and disabled notifications).
FWIW I think the reason I moved away from SwiftKey was because it kept having strange language issues in a multilingual setup, but I haven't used it in a while; probably 5+ years.
Maybe I'm just not a touchscreen keyboard power user any longer
My biggest gripe with GBoard is the word prediction for swipes that are ambiguous.
It consistently gives me "sine" over "some" and never learns. I type "sine" maybe a couple of times a day and type "some" dozens of times a day. I imagine getting the weighting right is tricky but it just seems to be wrong most of the time.
I don't remember SwiftKey being any better but I might give it another try just in case.
It’s a keyboard. Better predictive text and better multi-language support are flagship features. It’s such a fundamental part of how you interact with your device that even a tiny incremental improvement gets amplified into a sizeable QoL improvement.
Superficially yes[1]. But they are so much better, especially the multi-language support, that nothing else really compares. I've been using Swiftkey since before the Microsoft purchase, and really dislike having to use the default keyboards on both Android and iOS.
[1] It also has a lot more configurable keyboard layouts and theming, but I don't really use those.
A lot of customization options too - size and theme, number row or not, arrows or not, include accents in long-press menus, etc.
But the better predictive text is kind of huge. Makes typing much faster and easier when the predictions are more commonly correct. As an aside, I expect this could get massively better over the near future given this new investment in LLMs.
I've been using it on Android for many years now. The stock keyboards are, perhaps ironically, like the stock browser in Windows was until very recently: the one you use to get the good one. (Edge is still that, but now it's also the place to use Bing Chat...)
IMO, here’s a lot of room for improvement for German, because it’s a real dice roll whether a compound noun will be recognised or not. You can try swiping the components individually, but then you have to go deleting spaces everywhere. Unless there’s a feature I’m missing?
This is the sort of thing I think someone would have found a better solution for if more languages (and possibly English in particular) had non-spaced compound nouns.
Swiping is a blessing on iPhone Mini, but it's not available in my language for some reason. Multilingual input, I can just start typing in English or Czech and two words in, the keyboard knows. And even for normal tap-typing, the accuracy is a bit better because the keyboard apparently learns from your mistakes and basically builds a virtual keyboard with shifted letters underneath the visible one.
(to be clear I'm petty enough to be willing to give it all up for not having to stare at a fucking Bing button, so I uninstalled it)
I don't stare at my keyboards, so I never noticed the Bing key, but I just checked, and indeed, it's there. (Now I'm wondering if I will now keep seeing it..!?)
Tbh I have to stare at my smartphone keyboard or else I make a lot of typos. And about the button, it's not even that it takes up space or looks that bad, it's about the principles. In my world, you just don't put useless crap on someone's keyboard.
It offers adaptive, predictive input without the "auto-embarrass" and "change my prescription" feature of certain other keyboards with predictive input.
It also lets me write multiple languages, with working autocomplete in each, without changing keyboard.
Finally, for many of us who needs non-English input, the obvious other choice of iOS keyboard doesn't offer any predictions at all. I guess setting up embarrassing word swaps for Norwegian isn't a priority.
I write in two languages several times throughout the day, and worse: I code-switch all the time between the two (in the same text, that is).
That is definitely the killer feature for me. So I have an old version of swiftkey, blocked Internet access because fuck me if I let Microsoft snoop on all I write, and an xposed module (Exi) with useful mods.
PS: if anyone has a Free Software alternative I'm all ears.
Other than the things it does well, it has great ergonomics. On large Android phones it lets you raise the keyboard so you can type in the middle of the screen. Everyone else makes you type at the bottom of the device which is unbalanced.
I use it because it has shifted characters over regular keys, so I can get to the most used ones with a touch-hold-slide action vs. finding the "other" keyboard overlay, then hunt for it.
> "better predictive text" and "better multi-language support" - is that it?
For me this is half of it, it's also performance. It is MUCH faster at bringing up word suggestions. As in faster than I can even reach my thumb up to type the next word there are already excellent suggestions available, and I often can type entire sentences only touching keys on the keyboard a few times.
Just the performance difference makes the iOS builtin keyboard predictions almost unusable for me (in addition to the fact that the predictions are simply much better on swiftkey).
I'm on Android and I've been swyping on my keyboards since 2011 and SwiftKey since 2018. It seems to understand the movements of my fingers better than the other keyboards I have on my devices. The currently installed alternative is Samsung's keyboard. I probably never installed Google's one.
If I were tapping keys with two hands, which I sometimes end up doing (single handed)... no idea which keyboard would be better.
On android it's the only keyboard I could find whose position (not size of the keys) you can adjust without setting it to floating.
With the bezel-less smartphones, I found that if the keyboard sits at the bottom of the screen, one-handed typing is impossible for my thumb. With swiftkey I can basically add a bezel at the bottom to bring the keyboard up to where I can comfortably type with one hand.
I don't know whether it's standard feature on other keyboard, I love to use the clipboard and the ability to pin past clipboard and smiley shortcuts allow me to search.
Those two are probably small unimportant that make it feels home.
It has a lot of themes and layouts, various typing-related songs, like if you want auto-capitalization or auto-spacing on our off, but the main thing I got it for originally was it was geared towards swiping to type,which I found to be a lot faster than Garrity letter-at-a-time typing... I don't know if it was an early pioneer at that or what, but it seems like most other keyboards let you do that now, so it's advantage (if it ever had one is less than it used to be).
But, in any case, I do like how it can predict a word as you type, so you don't have to type the full word out before releasing your finger and it will toe out the rest, and it does a good job of predicting phrases I types a lot, so for those I don't even have to type them out fully... I just have to type the first word or so and then tap on the predicted words to fill in the rest (or however many words of the prediction I want)... it can be a time saver.
