SwiftKey’s New ‘Neural Network’ Text Prediction Is Impressively Good

SwiftKey’s New ‘Neural Network’ Text Prediction Is Impressively Good

I can’t stand writing on my phone. The keyboard is slow and mistakes are too easy. SwiftKey’s new “neural network” keyboard, however, has seriously impressed me. Now, predictions are useful enough that they significantly reduce the amount of time I spend typing on my phone.

SwiftKey announced its neural network keyboard back in October of last year, but it’s finally being released for everyone. Instead of looking at the last couple words in your text, SwiftKey now analyses your entire sentence to guess what words you want to type next.

It also suggests multiple words that usually belong together, such as “to be” and can understand the context of what you’re typing. For example, if you type “Let’s go to the” it can guess by the context that you might mean “beach”. The video above explains in more detail how the neural network approach helps make predictions better.

The keyboard’s predictions will learn over time, too. So the longer you use it, the better it should get. Personally, I’ve used Google’s stock keyboard by default for years, but after typing this whole article on it, I’m sorely tempted to switch. You can download the newest version of SwiftKey from the Google Play Store now.

SwiftKey [Google Play Store via SwiftKey]


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