Swiftkey Flow Beta Android App review

Free beta

Since phones moved to the touchscreen model, there have been apps such as Swiftkey that have aimed to make typing faster, and latterly have aimed to predict what we type. While many users claim that they are absolutely wedded to the physical keyboard models of their BlackBerrys, in fact when they transfer to touchscreens most do not look back.

With SwiftKey flow, two things come together: the first is to continuous typing to Swiftkey, meaning you simply glide (or ‘flow’) your finger from one letter to the next rather than tapping each key, and it also add the option of strings of words too. So users can drag their finger from one letter to the next, then to the space bar and start the next word, without ever taking your finger off the screen. While the single word option is increasingly built in to Samsung and Google Nexus devices such as the Nexus 4,the option to do sentences is incremental progress. When it works it can be a huge boon to the hurried user. When it doesn’t it’s infuriating but the balance is largely positive. I managed to ‘type’ entire messages without lifting my finger from the screen. While Google’s in-house version offers live updates on its suggestion in a bubble above your finger, Swiftkey does it in a bar above the keyboard.

The second is the continued SwiftKey feature of predicting the next word. This is less perfect –while it can analyse your Google and Facebook accounts to see your style, it doesn’t always get it quite right, and sometimes it’s just illiterate. The system presents three options each time: after I started typing “Are you” its next suggestions were “the” and OK”, both of which are plausible, but its third option was “are”. “Are you are” seems an unlikely way to begin a sentence.

Swiftkey Flow is, overall, a really good thing in the sense that Swype-style typing is good and largely accurate, and the word prediction is both often right and sometimes good enough that you’ll accept it. Frustratingly, however, the former doesn’t work everywhere it should, such as in the gmail search box on the Nexus 4, and the ‘flow’ part of incorporating the space bar can’t also predict words.