By Matthew Lynley
It’s nice being on top of the Android world.
That’s a position SwiftKey, the makers of an an application that speeds up typing by predicting what word comes next in a sentence, has held for some time.
The app SwiftKey has been downloaded more than 15 million times. It turns out an app that changes your keyboard turns out to be one of the most useful — and most popular — apps for Google's mobile operating system.
Here’s how it works: SwiftKey connects to your Facebook , Google, and Twitter accounts among others to build a profile of a user’s writing habits. When typing, a bar appears above the keyboard with suggested words, which users can tap to add directly to the text.
For fun, users can begin tapping right away to find out their most commonly used sentence. (Mine is, “Karaoke Every Sunday.”)
Beyond typing, SwiftKey this week unveiled a new way to input text by gliding a finger from letter to letter of the word across the keyboard to input a word. It’s similar to Swype, an existing style, but also uses SwiftKey’s predictive text, so users can stop moving when the right word comes up.
We caught up with Joe Braidwood, chief marketing officer, to get an update on the launch. Here is a lightly edited transcript of the interview:
How big is SwiftKey?
I just found out this morning, we’ve hit 15 million downloads of the app, that’s a pretty nice number — I’ll take that. Last week we’d hit 130 billion keystrokes saved by using SwiftKey. For every one of the folks out there using SwiftKey on a daily basis, SwiftKey saves them keystrokes when it predicts the next word. We did some back of napkin calculation, if you were to spend all of your time to type out 130 billion keystrokes, it would take you an entire millennium. That’s typing at about 20 words per minute, which is reasonable for a smartphone keyboard. It’s no understatement that this is a good movement.
What is SwiftKey Flow?
We decided that because anyone could pick up a phone and tap out words because that’s how keyboards worked on PCs and laptops, that mode was by far the majority method, we wanted to get that as clear and as good and as productive as we could before attacking anything else. About 6 to 8 months ago it felt about the right time to tackle the challenge of continuous input. That’s what SwiftKey Flow does, it taps right into that extremely powerful real-time prediction engine that we built. It starts predicting form the second you touch the screen. It will see and disambiguate based on what comes before. You don’t have to lift a finger, just let go when you have the word. What you get is an extremely efficient way of switching between modes. If you want to type you can tap away, if it feels right and it might benefit from a continuous gesture, then you can switch to that mode.
Can anyone tap into SwiftKey?
We provide an kit that is extremely powerful that allows developers to tap in to all of that and to use it in a way that then works for them. All of the innovation that we put into SwiftKey Flow is put into the kit. What they’ve taken is a white label engine and done interesting things with it. We’re not only confining those opportunities to big-ticket clients, we are happy to work with anyone who has a good enough idea. We’ve thought through each of those requests and we haven’t immediately dismissed them, but we have yet to see something compelling enough.
Is it free to add to an app?
We’ve invested millions and millions into building this engine, and for us to give it away at a platform level for free wouldn’t make any money back. The second we open source or API-ify this kind of technology, that’s when our big clients are going to just go straight to that. It’s different for Facebook, where they have a monetization channel, with this it’s a purely functional piece of technology.
Is anyone else trying to do the same thing?
We built this from scratch, on our own. We’ve patented it, we’re excited about the fact that we’ve done this ourselves. Some of our competitors have been inspired by what we’ve done, it’s a two way street. SwiftKey Flow is not by any means something that’s unique to one business out there. People have been doing this from a number of perspectives for the last five years. Most of the people who have done this have been bought by the same company. This has been done for ten years with eye-tracing technology for disabled people. The concept of joining the dots on a screen is not completely unique. I think we’re extremely confident that we’ve built this through our own approach.
What do you need to use it?
This is not confined to Jelly Bean (Android’s newest operating system) at all. It works from Gingerbread (a very early Android operating system) upward. We haven’t received any help for building it. We obviously rely on Google to troubleshoot and promote our products, but we’re at the beginning of the testing phase. From the perspective of us building this, it’s absolutely been done in-house.
How’s your relationship with Google?
We’ve always had an extremely friendly and strong relationship with Google, it’s very easy to be on the good side of the fence. We always seem to get time with the people we liase with on the Android ecosystem team. With the last few months having even less time, we’ve always had a friendly face at the end of a conversation. I haven’t seen any noticeable difference other than trying to find time to meet with them because they’re slammed. The Google Play ecosystem has been developing wonderfully, we’re extremely proud to be a part of it, we’re the top-selling application in 23 countries around the world, including the U.S. and the U.K. It’s helped that Google Play isn’t a kind of nerdy ecosystem from early-adopter apps, it’s a rich ecosystem of content. It’s everything now from books, movies, TV shows, music and, of course, apps. That has been an interesting transition.
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