65 billion keystrokes saved? That’s just the beginning for SwiftKey

Intelligent keyboards for Android smartphones are hot, hot, hot. Just a day after Swype announced the newest version of its smart keyboard, competitor SwiftKey is unveiling Swiftkey 3, the “artificially intelligent keyboard” that “reads your mind to make typing faster.”

And it’s half-price too, just for today. Now that’s really reading your customers’ minds.

While Swype improves text entry speed by asking users to draw or swipe between letters on a keyboard, SwiftKey focuses on intelligent awareness and understanding of your intent. Not only will the software correct words with fairly startling accuracy, it also suggests the next word, based on words and phrases you commonly use.

So the unintelligible “thisidfabtasic” is translated to “this is fantastic,” and the somewhat narcissistic “I am a beautiful …” gets the next word suggestion “person.”

The software can be synced with your email, Twitter tweets, and Facebook status updates as well to better learn your style and vocabulary, and get better at suggesting and correcting words. So far, the company says it’s saved users over 65 billion keystrokes.

The company has some pretty strong quantitative data to back up its assertions of superior performance.

In a study done with Pocket-lint, the gadget site, SwiftKey learned that while 72 percent of people rated their phone as very good or excellent, only 28 percent believed the same was true about typing on the standard Android keyboard. Adding SwiftKey to respondents’ phones increased the experience rating of typing from a six out of ten to a nine out of ten.

Perhaps the more shocking finding of the survey was that over half, 57 percent of users, report typing on their phone for more than an hour a day.

SwiftKey 3 is also available for Android tablets, where users can opt for a standard full-screen keyboard or an innovative split keyboard that looks very thumb-friendly when holding your device in two hands:

The company is also launching a custom version for the medical industry called SwiftKey Healthcare, which is designed to help health care professionals take quicker, better notes on tablets.

For a full look at the software, check this gallery:

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Or, to get a better sense of how SwiftKey works, watch the demo video:

Image credit: ShutterStock