World Text Record gets crushed by Android Swiftkey X user
Talk about laying the smack down on a Guinness Book of World Records speed texting record! Rachael Loncar was down at the Austin Texas Big Android BBQ and decided it was time for her to obliterate the current record of 35.54 seconds which was then held by a Swype user Franklin Page. The phrase Guinness uses is uses:
“The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.”
That is no easy sentence but Rachael beat the old record by an amazing 24.84 seconds and completed the phrase in just 10.7 seconds flat! She did not use Skype either, she used another app called Swiftkey X. Swiftkey X, which obviously by crushing the world speed texting record, has incredibly accurate predictive text.
While the Big Android BBQ event did not look to have an official Guinness representative on hand, this is an unofficial record but no less impressive to say the least. For her efforts, Rachael is taking home a brand new Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.
[via Doug Simmons]
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Swype, not Skype
@dkg: Thanks for the heads up.
lol i bet she programmed in the phrase before the competition and hit the spacebar a bunch of times after the first couple words
Nikhil: I bet she didn’t. That would be very uncool.
Smith: The I am a beautiful person thing is a joke from when they released the beta. The idea behind this program is that using magical math and stats it predicts what word you’re most likely going to type next or are beginning to type, and if you don’t type anything, the first word it thinks you may want to type is I (the pronoun), then if you keep going, am, a, beautiful, person. That could be an intended joke, that they “programmed” it to do that like Nikhil is suggesting as what they did with this record thing, poking fun at mankind’s narcissism, it could have been an inadvertent byproduct of the program learning from itself in their initial development or maybe what we do is tell ourselves we’re beautiful. Whatever, it’s kind of funny.
Swiftkey is truly fantastic, hands down the best keyboard I’ve ever used, and I’ve used many, and in addition to helping you type quickly it dazzles you routinely with the genius that is its brilliant maths.
I remember Google buying a soft keyboard called Blindtype way back when and I was thinking this would probably go the way of Gizmo5, vaporware, stopware, where Google snatches something and that’s the last you hear of it. The only two reasons I can come up with as to why they do that is that they get excited about something, buy it then get sidetracked making robot cars and sort of forget about it, or they buy it to stop it because it’s somehow threatening or to keep Apple from getting it. In that sense, the Gizmo5 purchase could have been to protect Google Voice turf should they ever wish to go SIP or to protect relationships with carriers. But this thing is the right combination of great and not too weird that it wouldn’t kill Google to buy them (or license it) and lay it down as the stock keyboard.
Or not. That’s part of the beauty of Android, you get to choose from the top down. For some reason people like to criticize Android over that, saying things like the [blank] is so horrible that you have to go on the market and get some third party thing. First of all, [blank] isn’t that horrible and secondly, so what.
The Swiftkey people are also relatively prolific in coming up with noticeable improvements and dishing them out regularly. Makes you look forward to time passing and seeing what they come up with.
One handy random feature of Swiftkey is that you can tell it that you communicate in multiple languages (at the moment it looks like they’ve got 32 different languages) so that if you’re bilingual or whatever and jump from English to French and back a lot, it smushes the prediction maths of the two languages together so it’s not autocorrecting you wrongly, also tossing in the right accents.
I think it’s better than Swype and this speed record thing is a nice feather in its cap but even if Swype had the ideal structure for mankind to blast out that phrase the fastest, if you gave one random group of people Swype and another Swiftkey, I’d wager the average typing speed of the Swiftkey group would be both faster and more accurate than that of the Swypers.
Anyway, thanks for running this Smith. Almost as good as my article.
Doug: I agree, it’s very uncool. But it took me 30 seconds to type the first 10 words on Swiftkey X (full version). Something smells fishy about her typing that whole thing in 10 seconds. I’m not sure I could do that on my computer that quickly! lol. i think the point i’m trying to make is that swiftkey doesn’t NATURALLY predict things like that, but analyzes your past history to look for patterns of words you usually type together or have typed in the past. That’s why I think she was able to do it so quickly – because it was in swiftkey’s history.
Yea I have to agree that something smells fishy here (every pun intended) it takes me longer than 10 sec to type a “yes dear” reply to my wife using Swiftkey X 🙂