Starting with size, the USA is the country with the most SwiftKey users – Google Play tells us that 42% of our users are in the States. But neighboring Mexico has the most productive typists, each entering 2,650 characters per day, compared to an average of 1,794. That’s enough to fill 19 tweets.

Denmark is the country with the most efficient typists – the average efficiency there is 37%, compared to 34% overall. Perhaps this is because Danish users love to use SwiftKey predictions – one in 15 of their words is chosen without typing a single letter (6.7%, vs 4.3% on average).

Who likes to go with the Flow? India has the highest percentage of users with SwiftKey Flow turned on at 84% (vs 74% overall). Polish users flow nearly a third of their text (as opposed to tapping it or choosing predictions), 31% compared to a worldwide average of 24%. And Canadians flow the longest distance, at 6.4m/day (vs 5.1m overall).

What about themes? Users in Mexico, as well as doing the most typing, are also most likely to change theme, with 73% choosing one other than the default ‘Cobalt’. Norwegians are the opposite – 60% stay with Cobalt. Overall 53% of users change theme and 47% stick with the default. What theme have you chosen? If you use Cobalt is it because you think it’s the most beautiful theme, or have you not looked at the others?

Users in Indonesia are the most colorful – they are the top users for the Neon theme (24% vs 13% overall) and also for Pumpkin (12% vs 6.0%), Dark (11% vs 4.4% overall), and Berry (8.0% vs 3.5%)

Russian users are the biggest fans of Holo (18% vs 14%), modeled on the Android design guidelines and voted for by our VIPs. Folks in Vietnam like Light (11% vs 5.4%), users in Turkey are most likely to want to turn their keyboard Sky blue (9.1% vs 4.2%), and Irish SwiftKey users are the biggest fans of the pink theme Fuchsia (5.8% vs 2.4%).

Greek SwiftKey users have two distinctions – they are the most likely to have two or more languages enabled (60% vs 21% overall) and also the sloppiest typists – SwiftKey corrects 10% of all characters typed by users in Greece, compared to 8% overall. The country with the most tri-lingual users is Switzerland, where 14% of users have three languages enabled (vs 4.3% overall) – not surprising given its proximity to France, Germany and Italy.

And finally, users in Vietnam are most likely to hit the “share” button on their stats. Why not join them and share your stats with us?

Looking forward to seeing your stats,
Charlie

PS You may want to ask: how do we know this? SwiftKey periodically sends us statistics, like those on your stats page, in order to help us to understand how people use SwiftKey and how we can make it better. This is totally anonymous and does not include any information on what you have been typing. SwiftKey users’ privacy is very important to us and you can read our privacy policy in full here.

The post The world according to SwiftKey appeared first on SwiftKey.

The preparations were underway weeks in advance. Many staff broke up their working days by rehearsing with instruments in our ‘breakout area’ downstairs and spontaneously forming bands with teammates.

For the night itself, the organizers (Sarah and Helen) put an amazing effort into transforming the breakout area into what could have been a super-cool live music bar in the city; even manually blacking-out all of the windows with bin-bags and sticky tape to achieve the optimum lighting in spite of clocks going forwards for daylight savings. Tables were covered in platters of delicious food and the drink was flowing freely. It was great having a few staff from United Learning, who occupy our 3rd floor, also join us for the merriment.

The atmosphere was ideal for the performers to try out new songs or play live for the first time, all in a friendly environment. The audience was treated to music from a range of genres and instruments including guitar, piano, violin, electronic looping machine and mandolin. Performers spanned all of the SwiftKey departments, with even our CTO making his Music Night debut.

Some unusual performances included an improvised saxophone solo piece by Richard L, inspired by words shouted out by members of the audience (‘twilight’, ‘sea’, ‘badger’ and ‘mushroom’), and also a singalong SwiftKey rendition of ‘House of the rising sun’, courtesy of Doug. We’ll leave you with the lyrics:

“There is a place near London Bridge
They call the SwiftKey Towers
And it’s been the workplace of many a poor boy [and girl]
For oh-so many hours

My Founder a civil servant
He dreamed of better typing
He will not cease his endless search
His travels or his skyping

The other was an expert
in things to do with text
He thinks of tricks to save you time
And ways to predict your next

But mentors tell your mentees
Don’t sign up for missus Doyle
She’ll keep you bobbing up and down
In a wash of tea and toil.”

By Precious Hamilton-Brown

The post A musical night at SwiftKey appeared first on SwiftKey.

Seeing as Easter weekend coincided with April 1st this year, we wanted to ensure whatever we published that day wasn’t just a spoof press release but something you’d actually be able to get your hands on – an Easter egg in the product! SwiftKey Tilt was built on one of our Innovation Days by Tom, a software engineer, and integrated with the help of the rest of the app team (it didn’t take any engineering time away from the fixes and features we’re working on). We hope you enjoyed it.

The response has been phenomenal – our video has received more than 123,000 views so far and we’ve had some hilarious messages from users all around the world. Here are some of our favorite replies:

The SwiftKey Tilt Harlem Shake

Gary, a user in Canada, spotted our homage to the latest viral video craze towards the end of the video and decided to turn the footage into a proper Harlem Shake. Taking part are co-founder and CTO Ben Medlock, most of the devs who work on the app and the SDK, our language engineers as well as most of the marketing team! We think Gary’s edit is absolutely brilliant and well worth a watch.

Jill’s joy

SwiftKey Tilt also brought us into contact with an American fan called Jill. She tweeted us a screenshot of herself using SwiftKey Tilt, adding: “I can’t believe I can make this work with this disabled body! SO COOL, THANX GUYS.” We wanted to hear more about Jill’s story and she explained she loved trying out the pinball-style input method and saw real potential as disabilities restrict her mobility. She followed up by sending us this brilliant video which we wanted to share with all of you. It meant a lot to us and to the developer who originally built Tilt, who said it “made my day”. Thanks for sharing your story Jill!

All our social media followers

Thank you for embracing our stunt with such energy and enthusiasm. We really enjoyed watching bafflement at such a bizarre release turn to amusement when you saw the video and then intrigue as we dropped hints that there was a real feature you could go hunt for (for the record, make sure you have 4.0.1, the latest update, type Tilt and then press and hold the prediction bar and select “SwiftKey Tilt” from the pop-up menu). We love being able to surprise you with fun treats alongside vital bug fixes and feature innovations. You can read some of the best comments by searching #swiftkeytilt on Twitter, reading the comments below the YouTube video or checking out our blog. Thanks to all those who played along with us and enjoyed trying SwiftKey Tilt.

Until next time,

Ruth Barnett
Head of Communications, SwiftKey

The post SwiftKey Tilt – your reactions to our April Fools’ Easter Egg appeared first on SwiftKey.

Efficiency is a measure of how much less you have had to tap your screen because of SwiftKey. The average efficiency on SwiftKey 4 is 34%, which means that for every 100 characters typed users only tap the screen 66 times.

Distance Flowed is pretty self-explanatory, it tells you how far you have flowed on your screen. I’ve flowed over 1 kilometer – a mile is 1,600m.

Keystrokes saved is the number of keystrokes that SwiftKey has saved you when you are tapping. If you type “I am a beautiful person” just by choosing predictions then you have tapped the screen 5 times, entered 24 characters (including spaces) and saved 19 characters.

Typos corrected counts how many characters SwiftKey has changed for you. If you typed “Frrdsu” and it corrected to “Friday” then the R, the S, and the U have been changed, so that’s three typos corrected. If you miss a letter (or miss a space) and it gets inserted, that counts as one typo corrected. If you type an extra character and it gets removed, that also counts.

Words Flowed is a count of how many words you’ve entered using SwiftKey Flow. You can see from my stats that a lot of my typing is actually flowing.

Words predicted shows how many words you have written without typing a single character, either by choosing the prediction or (if your spacebar is set to “always insert a prediction”) by tapping the spacebar to enter the next word.

Words completed or corrected counts the number of times that SwiftKey has inserted a prediction after you have typed one or more letters (or if you typed the whole word, but SwiftKey corrected it for you). This can happen by you choosing a word from the prediction bar or by tapping the spacebar.

Words Tilted shows the number of words entered by the “pinball” of SwiftKey Tilt.

What do your stats say about you? Are you an efficient prediction-chooser, a super-speedy two-thumbed typist who relies on corrections, or do you go with the Flow? We’d love to hear about your stats in the comments.

Cheers,
Charlie

The post What do my SwiftKey stats mean? appeared first on SwiftKey.

We were recently named one of the most innovative mobile companies in the world and our last major release, SwiftKey 4, made typing even faster, easier and more personalized. It made us consider – can we push the innovation further and take typing in a whole new direction? In fact, can we take it in every conceivable direction and add a touch of pizazz at the same time?

SwiftKey Tilt is a revolutionary new input method which transforms the everyday activity of typing into a whole-body, immersive experience. It makes it possible to text loved ones, email colleagues and type soliloquies without even touching the screen; just rock, wiggle or shimmy your smartphone to insert words in a truly innovative way. Drawing on SwiftKey’s mind-reading word prediction ability, we believe SwiftKey Tilt is the most significant typing innovation since the quill.

See it – and us – in action in our new video:

SwiftKey Tilt works by unleashing a pinball into the keyboard to power a third, exciting way to type on your device. While tapping or flowing words, the device accelerometer sends the brightly colored ball across the keyboard and when it collides with a prediction, the word is inserted. This frees up thumbs to make even quicker progress through a text, email or Tweet. It also offers users an eye-catching way to interact with their devices and is fully compatible with both the Macarena and the Harlem Shake.

“We always felt that fundamentally typing is about how you express yourself,” said Dr Ben Medlock, SwiftKey co-founder and CTO.

“We realized that we’ve never really focused on making that possible through physical movement, though. With SwiftKey Tilt we’ve changed all that.  By moving your whole body to control the little pink ball, users can now be more expressive when they type. Whether that’s body poppin’, Gangnam Style or my personal Tilting move of choice of ‘the mash potato’, it leads to a more expressive and personalized result.”

The innovative new typing method is available today for all SwiftKey users inquisitive enough to find it.

Last but not least, this project was created during one of SwiftKey’s monthly staff Innovation Days and did not use any valuable core engineering time.

How do you Tilt? Post your videos and photos on Twitter using the hashtag #swiftkeytilt.

Happy April,

Team SwiftKey

PS Like this? ‘Like’ us on Facebook!

The post SwiftKey Tilt – the whole-body typing experience appeared first on SwiftKey.

Our VIP Community now has an incredible 100,000 members and I want to share with you what I believe sets SwiftKey apart from so many other apps on this scale. Of course, we have our team on this end who pour their hearts into the development of the application; to say they are great at what they do would be an understatement. However, without our community’s input, SwiftKey simply wouldn’t be what it is today. We call you ‘VIPs’ for good reason! I have a very strong connection to this community. In fact, I actually started off as a user, and that evolved into me becoming a full-time member of the team – a real testament to the fact that SwiftKey values its users!

SwiftKey has evolved organically from the start. It started with an idea between two guys… Ben Medlock and Jon Reynolds, now our CTO and CEO, respectively. They wanted to tackle the widespread struggle they observed with people typing on tiny keyboards. From the very start, they recognized that this was a challenge about people and their language use, not about keyboards and code. Over time, the SwiftKey public forum was introduced which constantly provides us with a rudder to help steer the ship that is the SwiftKey application. This provided us with the opportunity to hear what you, our users, have to say. Still, we wanted to listen more. As a result, the VIP Community was created in November 2010.

For those of you who are not yet SwiftKey VIPS, let me give you a snapshot of what it entails. We take a collaborative approach to making SwiftKey awesome. Our VIPs help us to test the app across a wider variety of devices and languages that wouldn’t be possible without their help. They additionally generate and inform us of their ideas, as well as helping other users to get the most out of SwiftKey. We also greatly appreciate the way our VIPs relentlessly evangelize about the company and app amongst their friends and family, and enthusiastically back us for industry awards.

In return, they get access to our work before it goes on general release; they get to be heard and we like to throw out swag and offer up competition prizes when we’re able to. Most of all, we hope they know their voices are heard within the company – their feedback is heard and discussed by the founders, the management team and most importantly, by the very people who build and refine our products.

Now beyond 100,000 users, the VIP Community represents a subset of our total user base which has now grown to around 2 million. There are so many different perspectives on what would make SwiftKey the very best keyboard it can be and we strive to take all of these different opinions into consideration when we make improvements to the application. The VIP Community is a unique space for a more active dialog between users and the SwiftKey Team. It also has blossomed into a fantastic site where users help other users with different tips and tricks they’ve discovered.

With every new VIP that joins us, our global perspective increases. This enables us to make as many people happy with SwiftKey as we possibly can. I know that everyone may not always agree with one another, but there’s dialog. This throws open the scope for growth in a way that simply wouldn’t be possible without you guys. This symbiosis between users and the SwiftKey team is not something that I’ve seen before – not on this level. I feel incredibly privileged to be part of this and I wanted to make this message perfectly clear.

We’ve said it before, but I want this to resonate. You are all beautiful people. With your participation, we will continue to build the very best keyboard that we can. You can sign up for the VIP Community here.

Thank you for being with us on this journey.

Evan

The post SwiftKey VIP smashes through 100,000 mark appeared first on SwiftKey.

We wanted to thank Graham and showcase who’s behind one of the user handles you might’ve seen on the vip.swiftkey.net site. For new readers, the VIP community is a forum for users to give feedback, share ideas and get their hands on betas. VIPs are a hugely important part of the SwiftKey story, so thank you to Graham and all of those who give their time and effort to making SwiftKey even better.

Over to GS88…

1. What’s your name? (real and VIP handle)
My real name is Graham and my VIP handle is GS88.

2. Where are you from?
I have lived in Texas for my entire life.

3. What’s your day job?
I am a field engineer for a large oil field service company.

4. How did you first hear of SwiftKey?
If I remember correctly, I first heard about SwiftKey from an Engadget article. I have been using it since 2009 when it was just a Beta product. I fell in love with the app and purchased it the day it was released as a full app in the (then) Android Market.

5. What do you think makes SwiftKey different?
Of course, the prediction quality is second to none. The way it is able to learn from a variety of sources to help better predict words is very impressive. Smart Space is a fantastic feature. The smart punctuation key is also innovative and efficient.

The entire SwiftKey team has done a phenomenal job with the creation and continuous improvement of the app. I must also credit the VIP Community with helping along the way with testing and giving feedback on beta releases.

6. How many keystrokes have you saved using SwiftKey?
Honestly, I haven’t the slightest clue for an exact number. Since I started using SwiftKey I have had two phones and two tablets. All of them have been rooted, and I flash new ROMs regularly. Between that and SwiftKey betas, I cannot give a precise number. I can say with confidence that I have saved hundreds of thousands of keystrokes (at least).

7. What’s it like to be part of the SwiftKey VIP Community?
I love being involved in the VIP Community. It is a great group and it is nice being able to help and give back to SwiftKey. I know I’m helping improve the quality and future product that will be released to the masses.

8. What are your three favorite apps? (apart from SwiftKey)
This is such a tough question. To only pick three apps is difficult because I could choose three top apps for a root user and three top apps for a non-root user. To keep this open to everyone, I’ll list three  non-root apps. In alphabetical order:

• Agenda Widget for Android [free] – I love this widget. It is a super customizable agenda widget. I found it a couple of years ago and have been using it since. Having a list of my upcoming events on my home screen keeps me aware of my own life (it gets pretty busy). The widget is also scrollable which is a great feature. I like tweaking the appearance of my phone regularly, and this is the perfect widget for color and style adjustment. I’d even say that for a novice there may be too many options.
• Battery Widget? Reborn! [free] – This is another highly customizable widget. It’s relatively new. I just found it and started using it a few months ago. It is still a ‘beta’ app, but I put beta in quotes because nothing about the app implies a beta product. It is very functional with a variety of information and features available within the app (including eta for dead battery, toggles, notification icon and more). The widget can also be color customized and can be resized. This is perfect for any user who has a battery widget.
• BeautifulWidgets [paid] – Again, another highly customizable widget. The recent redesign is wonderful. It really is a “beautiful” app now. The UI looks great. There are so many themes available as well as other options for tweaking the appearance of the widget. The large clock format combined with the date and visual weather animations is fantastic to have on my home screen. Tapping the clock opens alarms. Tapping the weather opens a more detailed forecast. Tapping the date opens my calendar.

9. What are your three favorite websites or blogs?
I visit a number of websites and blogs on a daily basis. For Android related info I hit up Droid Life (droid-life.com), as well as many others. I love cars, so I visit Autoblog (autoblog.com) pretty obsessively. Recently I started reading a web comic called JL8 (previously “Little League” jl8comic.tumblr.com) that follows the lives of the Justice League during their childhood. There have not been an exceptionally large number of strips posted, so it wouldn’t be too difficult to catch up if you are interested.

10. Tell us something unusual about yourself!
I guess an unusual fact is that on my mom’s side of the family I am a 4th generation Houstonian. On my dad’s side of the family I am only a second generation American (my grandfather was born in Poland).

Graham’s post is the second in a blog series about our VIPs following our profile of James – also known as “driftinganomaly”.

The post Meet the VIPs – GS88 appeared first on SwiftKey.

Hi there SwiftKey fans,

Many thanks for all of your feedback regarding SwiftKey Flow beta, it has been really helpful to hear what you love, what you’re not so sure of, and of course your bug reports.

While we’ve been gathering up your feedback our developers have not been resting - they’ve been working hard on a number of performance enhancements to make SwiftKey Flow work faster and more smoothly on your devices.

• Download SwiftKey Flow Beta 4.0.0.61  for smartphones
• Download SwiftKey Flow Beta 4.0.0.61 for tablets

Please download these APKs and leave us your feedback on our VIP Community – your comments can help shape the future of SwiftKey.

Watch this space for more updates and new features based on feedback from our awesome VIPs.

Cheers, Charlie

SwiftKey Flow Beta 4.0.0.61 changelog

• Flow-through-space autocommit: if you flow-through space but mess up your last word, all the prior words will be inserted (instead of losing all the words)
• Flow in landscape on tablets (not on split layout with numpad)
• Battery usage improved (when flowing and when not in use)
• Performance of flowing and tapping improved
• Longpress of bottom-right (smiley/enter) button now works
• Fixed some force close issues
• Fixed some memory leaks
• Predictions not lost when changing keyboard layout (e.g to symbols)
• Fixed DOuble CApitalization issue

Things to be aware of:

• Flowing currently only works in fields where you see the prediction bar: in fields that have their own prediction or completion there is no prediction bar and therefore no Flow (e.g. URL bars, search bars, the “to” field of an email)
• Flow-through-space only works in languages where smart space works – in some languages this is turned off because words are often made by combining other words together,and so smart space would divide up words that you want to keep as one. Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Persian (Farsi), Romanian, Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish, Ukranian, Urdu may not work with Flow-through-space
• SwiftKey Flow Beta does not currently contain any features that were new in SwiftKey 3.1 (Berry theme, new languages, split layout in landscape for normal-sized devices)
• Slide-left-to-delete a whole word does not work when Flowing is enabled – instead try holding down the backspace key to delete word-by-word

Known issues:

• Flow trail is sometimes left on the screen at the end of a word
• Personalization service continues running when it has finished
• Memory usage is still higher than we would like
• Flow trail is very faint on some CyanogenMod ROMs
• Force closes on Motorola Atrix and LG G2X with custom ROMs >= 4.0
• If a language pack is downloaded while typing the keyboard is not refreshed
• Predictions are too large on LDPI devices
• Predictions occasionally lost when alternately backspacing/spacing at the end of a word
• Ukrainian spit layout is broken
• Estonian words containing ö are not predicted
• Arrow keys do not repeat on longpress

The post New SwiftKey Flow Beta appeared first on SwiftKey.

We do a lot more on our phones than we did 20 years ago. When we surveyed 17,000 smartphone users earlier this year with Mobile Nations and Pocket-Lint, we found people email, text, and browse the internet on their phones more than they make calls – communication on smartphones is largely through typing not speaking. We also found people rate being able to type easily as being as important as call quality and more important than price, camera, appearance or brand.

Here’s SwiftKey CEO and co-founder Jon Reynolds on why the party’s not over for the SMS:

“Far from this 20th anniversary marking the death of the text message, people are actually communicating using their thumbs more than ever.

“An Ofcom report in 2012 showed that 58% of people communicate by texts on a daily basis compared to just 47% making phone calls, with texts overtaking for the first time. What’s more, modern so-called threats to SMS are really text messages over wifi and in another format – WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook all borrow from the original technology.

“Although the core technology of SMS has barely changed in 20 years, helping people accurately and quickly get their thoughts down remains the challenge, and where the recent innovations have been. The alphanumeric keyboards of the 90s have been vastly improved upon with smartphones.

“At SwiftKey we use artificial intelligence to learn how the user writes to improve auto-correction and give accurate next word predictions. In the next 20 years our text messages are likely to be able to write themselves based on what the phone knows about the user.

“The simplicity of text based communication and generous data plans mean that SMS remains in real terms as popular as ever.”

Do you remember the first SMS you ever sent? How old were you and what might it have said?

PS The SwiftKey Flow beta is coming very soon, I promise. We’re really excited about it.

Best wishes,

Ruth

The post Happy birthday SMS! appeared first on SwiftKey.

No – it’s Movember, the month when men grow moustaches in order to raise awareness (and donations) for prostate and testicular cancer. The rules are strict – according to the Movember website “there is to be no joining of the mo to the sideburns (that’s considered a beard), there’s to be no joining of the handlebars to the chin (that’s considered a goatee)”.

You can find out more about Movember here. If you’d like to donate and support Team SwiftKey, you can go to http://mobro.co/SwiftKey and click on “donate to my team” on the left-hand side  - all donations go to prostate and testicular cancer research.

Check out our album on Facebook for the full set of pictures and let us know who you think has the snazziest tache! The mo with the most likes may receive a prize…

The post SwiftKey does Movember appeared first on SwiftKey.