SwiftKey, Unlike Breasts, Is Artificial in an Intelligent Way
The SwifKey guys, makers of the supreme, and I mean really the best, kickass AI soft keyboard have continued to step their game up. The game’s been stepped up pretty high actually. You know, they’ve got the only mailing list I have not yet hit unsubscribe on because they just keep the good stuff coming and it’s time to give you an update.
Quick refresher, SwiftKey has the autosuggestion that other keyboards have, except the others just work by narrowing down a dictionary file as you type whereas SwiftKey does all this crazy statistical math in order to pinpoint with near-God-like% accuracy everything you’re about to type. Check this, when I don’t even type anything but hit the suggested word a bunch of times it comes up with “I am a beautiful person.” Exactly what I was going to say.
Heads up suckers, embedded tl;dw youtube clip time!!
Previously that crazy math operated on maybe a couple megs of data of how people write on phones plus whatever SwiftKey learns, like voice recognition software does, about how individual users type and improves over time. Out of the box with its sick Fluency engine that is so badass they had to ™ that shit (probably to keep Microsoft from patenting it and shaking them down with their threats and NDAs, scumbags), out of the box, about one third of the next word you’re about to bang in has already been accurately predicted. Enter in one or two letters, 80%.
Eighty fucking percent. Did you hear what I said?
But now, game changer baby! Like Mango, except it exists! SwiftKey X just hit the streets. To get the whole learning thing out of the way, figuring out how you type and misspell things and whatever it is you do that makes you special insofar as your grasp on various languages (it supports 17 languages…) and typing behavior, SwiftKey X now offers to, if you want, to breeze through your Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, texts and whatever else, in order to size you up statistically to help guess what you want to type so that you don’t have to actually type those things.
Some kind of multilingual smartass? SwiftKey’s got you covered in doing its math thing in three languages at the same time. Sounds like some crazy dual core math to me!
SwiftKey X, I should note, is in beta right now and free. In exchange for being guinea pigs a focus group and a crowdsourced bug detection farm, you get to run it indefinitely for free. By indefinitely I do not necessarily mean permanently but who knows. The tried and true version that lacks this Gmail and Facebook stuff but is still great and solid and won’t one day tell you to pay up is right here, set you back $2.01, a possible F you to those who’d charge $1.99 assuming you people are that stupid that you’d be much more inclined to buy something if it were under $*.00. Regular SwiftKey has 100K-500K installs, the en fuego SwiftKey X Beta released May 27th is already in the 10k-50k range. Take your pick here.
These guys seem to be angling to get OEMs to pick them up. So early adoption enthusiasts, here you go.
Already have SwiftKey and get the idea? Okay bro, well the new version lets you theme a bit, dark, it figures out where you tend to hit the keys and remaps it self subtly to compensate for your clumsiness better, … whatever, the damn thing is so good you’ll want to blog about it on a Friday night – perhaps while using SwiftKey – or pout about how Microsoft’s stock keyboard rules on its own and they don’t make you install some third party thing just to get something half decent like Android (whatever kiwis – by the way, heard you’re going dual core sometime next year, high five, way to keep up… friggin winmorons, candy asses, hey, next to you and your fantasy Nokia phones and your phantom update release dates, poop looks sexy).
Android Market link, baby. And high five SwiftKey, keep cooking up the drums of whoop ass, good luck with the tablet project and thank you. Enjoy my Gmail, got some hot stuff in there. 
Doug Simmons
Related Posts
About The Author
Doug Simmons
Biographical info.. hmm. I have a history of not being able to strike the balance between what is "safe" to put into these forms and what is, in my mind at least, funny. Can't do it.
Doug, I like the garbage you write. It’s grammatically correct for the most part and at least it’s entertaining. I’m gonna let you keep winning the Android is better argument until WP7 allows us to tether, send contact business cards by sms or bluetooth etc. Truth is, Android is what I had hoped for WinMo6.5 to become. A rewritten optimised version of the old multitasking and for the most part open system. Truth is, I might be quite satisfied if I were to get an Android, but there is a sexiness and appeal about the fluidity and easy experience that iPhone started and WP7 is perfecting in good time. I should probably suck it up and get an Android until then … but that’s a fanboi thing that I don’t think I can overcome. Google’s honeymoon is over and the can will open on your ass with Mango and Nokia.
Good evening Ali,
Your [gerund] calling what I write garbage notwithstanding, just thought I’d say that it struck me as very flattering even compared to those calling me a “genius in my own right,” an “idiot savant” and the like as you pointed out the grammar.
That’s a big deal to me for a lot of reasons, tough to articulate actually; guess it started as a kid in school when, and this never changed, I received horrible grades, routinely toward the bottom of my class. And now, look at me, even though I write garbage, my writing, the grammar and maybe diction in particular, its excellence really stands out. Maybe it just stands out because it’s juxtaposed with crap, no steak and just sizzle, but it stands out nonetheless. It almost throws people through a loop that I sound vaguely intelligent at least in my writing, albeit fucking moronic in what I’m writing.
I need to feel proud of something so if that’s a candidate I’ll seize onto it with fierce tenacity just like you and your people seize onto the hope that WinMo’s success is, as usual, just around the corner; and also how you probably are seizing onto the hope that MSIE 10 will patch up Microsoft’s hemorrhaging browser share with its GPU bullshit and whatever else you like about IE so much.
This is nether here nor there, but FYI, at least when on wifi your Optimus 7 is reporting a bogus user agent,
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; XBLWP7; ZuneWP7)", and as a result is not getting counted as being a phone, specifically a Windows Phone, when you visit any websites that parse their logs with that data making its way to the aggregation sites that the so-called analysts rip on. Perhaps I just uncovered a clue that would give WP a .02% boost. Every .02% matters you know.Cheers, mate.
Returning briefly to the thing I was first writing about, SwiftKey, after running through my Gmail, is twice as good at predicting what I’m going to write. Seriously it’s a huge improvement, night and day almost. It’s like they made the thing just for me, now that it’s studied my email.
I don’t know if there are a lot of people out there who don’t trust the SwiftKey people to run around their email and social network stuff but if there are a lot of holdouts citing privacy, perhaps they could come up with a way for you to designate what part of your email you want them to examine or not examine or maybe just let you manually dump a clump to their servers. Nah, too complicated. But this is genius stuff, hope OEMs grab hold of it. Good enough that I enabled the spacebar autocomplete finally.
Just curious now that you brought the subject up. How were you able to get this information? Mind sharing it with us webmasters..
“This is nether here nor there, but FYI, at least when on wifi your Optimus 7 is reporting a bogus user agent, “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; XBLWP7; ZuneWP7)”, and as a result is not getting counted as being a phone”
@Doug Simmons: Hmm, being one of the people who called you a genius in your own right, I feel as if that was a back-handed shout-out. No biggie, calling you a genius in your own right is kind of a back-handed compliment…
Getting on task, SwiftKey is impressive, I’ve typed a few paragraphs with about twenty to thirty screen taps. The other concern that I have is that it still saves credit card numbers/treats credit information like regular words and not passwords.
All in all, if you give it a thumbs up, I’ll try it. I wonder if it’s going to be as fun to use as Swype.
-Fight
By the way, you should mention that Swiftkey X is a beta.
98120: Because Smith is too cheap to get even a proper VPS (even though he thinks it’s his own VPS but it’s just some cpanel thing), and because his server-side Webalizer exaggerates traffic by counting any IP that touches the server including bots which account for over half of the hits, and because I’m so obsessed, and also because Google with their Analytics omits certain information for lame privacy reasons that would have crippled me here, I page tag the footer of all pages we serve, hotlinking a transparent blank gif on my batteryboss server which I typically use to stare at the hits flying by right after I post something either out of insecurity or narcissism, not sure which. But because we get a substantial amount of Google Reader traffic, those don’t snatch the blank.gif in the footers, so whenever I write an article or see an article of interest by someone else, I page tag the article itself so that I get the Google Reader and RSS hits.
But for Ali, slight revision, reversed his IP to get the host (for this purpose my server’s set to do hostnamelookups), looked up the geo for curiosity (hence Good evening and Cheers), then combed through my pile of mobilitydigest hits looking for his host and his hit to the blank gif specific to this article with a unique name. Gather round, time for me to show off that I at least know how to do something technical, but don’t break my balls about syntax redundancy or how this isn’t programming or whatever:
root@batteryboss:/var/log/apache# geoiplookup [redacted].nsw.optusnet.com.au
GeoIP City Edition: Marrickville, New South Whales, AU, Australia
root@batteryboss:/var/log/apache# grep '[redacted..].nsw.optusnet.com.au' mobility-access.log |grep 'unlike-breast'
[redacted].nsw.optusnet.com.au - - [27/May/2011:21:39:01 -0400] "GET /blankswiftkeybreasts.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 342 "http://mobilitydigest.com/swiftkey-unlike-breasts-is-artificial-in-an-intelligent-way/" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/5.0)"
I dug back a bit deeper and saw this hit from him:
[redacted].nsw.optusnet.com.au - - [19/May/2011:04:19:32 -0400] "GET /blankmulticore.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 342 "http://mobilitydigest.com/multicore-cool-or-whack-ask-the-readers/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; XBLWP7; ZuneWP7)"
Wondering what phone that was, the XBLWP7, googled it, googled harder and eventually found this.
This is your brain on adderall.
Fight: Thanks for the tip, added a paragraph dedicated to you (beta). And hey, if you’re uneasy about letting it crawl your gmail, I’ll come up with something for you. But they got my thumbs up.
Regarding credit cards and that jazz, why don’t I try to flag down this Joe Braidwood, chief marketing guy over at SwiftKey or its parent or whatever, and have him field that. Good question. I don’t know the answer, those eulas are tl;dr.
@Doug Simmons: Good looks. I did let it run through my gmail because I felt that was a truer representation of my writing style. Problem is that it runs in capability mode so it cuts off half the keyboard on my device, I guess I need to wait for the tablet version.
I said your article was entertaining. I reserve my opinion on your other talents. Btw, I’ve had the space bar auto complete on WP7 since day one because it does a bit more than just narrow down from a list. Also I’m using a Mozart not a Optimus and Wales is spelt without a ‘h’ (I know your just pasting but FYI).
the title alone is genius… almost as genius as the title picture