Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly does swiftkey offer over the usual keyboard? A quick google seems to bring up "better predictive text" and "better multi-language support" - is that it?
Swiftkey just lets me auto-complete/swipe in multiple languages seamlessly. Want to swipe 1 English word inside a completely Dutch sentence? No problem. The reverse? No problem. Using Google's keyboard the same way is endlessly frustrating.
Written on a SwiftKey keyboard used to write English, Swedish, Danish and Icelandic with minimal issues.
Though to be fair, I think the stock keyboard is probably almost as good these days and that the difference is that my SwiftKey keyboard has been trained on my writing for several years. Though I have no idea more than that I quickly get annoyed when I try to type on the stock one.
But if you need to loanword a non-common word from English into another language (e.g. Hebrew), Gboard just can't do it. If you change character sets, you change entire dictionaries. SwiftKey has a unified dictionary among all languages and makes a best guess approximation based on the current language selected and then tries the other languages you have configured.
This means that if you're going along in, say, French, but then need to reference a word in Hebrew, you can swipe over to Hebrew, bang out a word, then swap back to French, type words in English (which get autocorrected in english) and then continue in French. This isn't really feasible in Gboard without a lot of back and forth.
This is very obvious when I need to type on someone else's device or when I try other keyboards. They do similar things, each in their own way, but just don't do it quite so well as SwiftKey does it.
Since Microsoft bought the app I've stopped logging into it with an account (so reinstalls and new phones mean I need to retrain the keyboard) and have taken away the internet permission so it can't do any creepy stuff like send telemetry. Somehow Bing found itself into the keyboard, probably an automatic update I forgot to turn off in the Play store.
The addition of Bing is just one more sad step in the development of the app I probably use most on my phone. I switched to SwiftKey exactly because I didn't trust Google's Gboard and now all this Cortana 2.0 crap is making the keyboard just as bad as the one I dropped years ago.
Fast edit: it's Monday morning, I didn't realise there were so many other replies already.
EDIT: It's good, but not as good as Swiftkey in its UX. Swiping for punctuation doesn't work, you need to long press and swipe. Pressing space to insert the prediction and then pressing comma doesn't remove the space, so it requires an awkward dance to insert a comma and a prediction simultaneously. There's no gesture to dismiss the keyboard, the "delete word" swipe is a bit awkward, long pressing buttons doesn't give you punctuation, and that's just what I've found in a few minutes of use. I hope they address these soon.
It consistently gives me "sine" over "some" and never learns. I type "sine" maybe a couple of times a day and type "some" dozens of times a day. I imagine getting the weighting right is tricky but it just seems to be wrong most of the time.
I don't remember SwiftKey being any better but I might give it another try just in case.
I also don't to use my phone much anymore (since I reduced social media usage and disabled notifications).
FWIW I think the reason I moved away from SwiftKey was because it kept having strange language issues in a multilingual setup, but I haven't used it in a while; probably 5+ years.
Maybe I'm just not a touchscreen keyboard power user any longer
Superficially yes[1]. But they are so much better, especially the multi-language support, that nothing else really compares. I've been using Swiftkey since before the Microsoft purchase, and really dislike having to use the default keyboards on both Android and iOS.
[1] It also has a lot more configurable keyboard layouts and theming, but I don't really use those.
But the better predictive text is kind of huge. Makes typing much faster and easier when the predictions are more commonly correct. As an aside, I expect this could get massively better over the near future given this new investment in LLMs.
I've been using it on Android for many years now. The stock keyboards are, perhaps ironically, like the stock browser in Windows was until very recently: the one you use to get the good one. (Edge is still that, but now it's also the place to use Bing Chat...)
https://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability/#quicktype-ke...
Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Vietnamese.
This is the sort of thing I think someone would have found a better solution for if more languages (and possibly English in particular) had non-spaced compound nouns.
(to be clear I'm petty enough to be willing to give it all up for not having to stare at a fucking Bing button, so I uninstalled it)
It also lets me write multiple languages, with working autocomplete in each, without changing keyboard.
Finally, for many of us who needs non-English input, the obvious other choice of iOS keyboard doesn't offer any predictions at all. I guess setting up embarrassing word swaps for Norwegian isn't a priority.
That is definitely the killer feature for me. So I have an old version of swiftkey, blocked Internet access because fuck me if I let Microsoft snoop on all I write, and an xposed module (Exi) with useful mods.
PS: if anyone has a Free Software alternative I'm all ears.
Mixed language model learning: ngram models learnt on phone span base language models so it's very good at Spanglish.
A probabilistic typing model is learnt on device to capture characteristic patterns of key presses/misses for your typing style.
And, it does the slidy input if I want that.
For me this is half of it, it's also performance. It is MUCH faster at bringing up word suggestions. As in faster than I can even reach my thumb up to type the next word there are already excellent suggestions available, and I often can type entire sentences only touching keys on the keyboard a few times.
Just the performance difference makes the iOS builtin keyboard predictions almost unusable for me (in addition to the fact that the predictions are simply much better on swiftkey).
If I were tapping keys with two hands, which I sometimes end up doing (single handed)... no idea which keyboard would be better.
Gboard is worth a try, it feels more responsive to me. Its predictions aren't always good though, at least in languages other than English.
With the bezel-less smartphones, I found that if the keyboard sits at the bottom of the screen, one-handed typing is impossible for my thumb. With swiftkey I can basically add a bezel at the bottom to bring the keyboard up to where I can comfortably type with one hand.
But, in any case, I do like how it can predict a word as you type, so you don't have to type the full word out before releasing your finger and it will toe out the rest, and it does a good job of predicting phrases I types a lot, so for those I don't even have to type them out fully... I just have to type the first word or so and then tap on the predicted words to fill in the rest (or however many words of the prediction I want)... it can be a time saver.
This along with swipe are life-savers.