One of our favorite methods is video. They’re brilliant fun to make (we run riot trying out different ideas, often looking silly in the process). We find they really connect with many of you – for example our YouTube channel has clocked up more than 7.6 million views.

We’ve had lots of questions about how we shot the video for our most recent major release, Say Hello To SwiftKey 4. Some of you were intrigued by the “floating phone” effect, which enabled the screen and keyboard to remain completely in focus, no matter how much the person holding the device moved around.

Filming a smartphone sounds easy right? Well if you ask anyone who has ever tried they’ll tell you otherwise. For our videographer Adam Gichie it is a fun challenge.

For a long time it frustrated Adam how limited we were with what we could do – even tiny movements by the person holding the phone can mean the screen goes out of focus and certain camera angles produce distracting moiré patterns disfiguring the screen (not ideal when you’re trying to keep the focus on the product and what it is capable of).

Adam explains: “This time I wanted to get a rock solid shot of the phone. Previously it was always shaky and difficult to see it in plain view. I wanted to make the video all about the app – front and center.”

He eventually came up with this amazing contraption. A cunning combination of brackets and a phone case that held the mobile (in this case, a Samsung Galaxy S3 and an LG Nexus 4) in a static place in relation to the camera, allowing the phone to always stay central and the screen to always remain in focus, no matter how much you move.

The only other challenge was to entice our staff to hold the contraption and to type while walking, playing table tennis and working. All the hands you see in that video belong to our own multilingual, multi-talented (and hugely obliging) coworkers.

We’re excited to see what we can conjure up next with Adam (who spends the rest of his time working on projects for Richard Branson, ELLE magazine and The Royal Navy). You can find out more about what he is up to by following imageandpicture on Facebook.

You can watch more of SwiftKey’s videos – such as our most fun shoot to date, SwiftKey Tilt – on our YouTube channel.

The post How we filmed it: SwiftKey’s secret weapon appeared first on SwiftKey.

When Fast Company recently named SwiftKey as one of the World’s Top 10 Most Innovative Mobile Companies, this added to a collection of awards we’ve received on this theme; ‘Most Innovative App’ at the GMAs (2012), a Guardian Digital Innovation Award for ‘Best Startup’ (2012), and a People’s Voice Webby Award for ‘Mobile Experimentation and Innovation’ (2012). We were also shortlisted for a Lovie Award in the category ‘Experimental & Innovation’. These sit among other awards we’ve won that, though they don’t explicitly reference innovation in the title, embody this quality.

In an internal study (read ‘sticky-note survey’), we found that ‘innovation’ was the word SwiftKey staff most associated with the company, by a significant margin. So, we wanted to bring this ‘innovation’ into sharper focus, and take a look at what this means in practice for us.

SwiftKey’s technology represents more than just an advancement on what already exists; it’s a fundamental leap forward. Since we started out in 2008, we’ve been intentional about maintaining a forward-looking approach. This has allowed us to create technology that pushes boundaries. As our CMO, Joe Braidwood, emphasized in a recent article for Forbes, SwiftKey is part of the evolution towards devices functioning as ‘butlers’ rather than ‘concierges’, intelligently anticipating our needs ahead of time. Harnessing years of research into Natural Language Processing and Machine learning, we’ve invented the first ‘intelligent’ keyboard.

SwiftKey has achieved many ‘firsts’, including: the first touchscreen keyboard with next-word prediction, with context-based learning, with personalization and adaptive learning over time, with truly multi-lingual capabilities, or to have a simple three-prediction user interface. However, the beauty of our technology is its relevance to real people’s everyday lives. Our stats show that we’ve saved our users a total of over 300 billion keystrokes. Also, our users have typed over one trillion characters with the SwiftKey app; printed out in a 10 point font these would wrap around the earth 300 times! There’s no avoiding the fact that the tech powering SwiftKey is highly advanced (the writing on the whiteboard walls of our HQ is enough to make any head spin), but the result is human-shaped and easy to use, and that’s a key reason our tech is here to stay. This was further confirmed by our recent selection as Official Honorees of the Webby Awards in the category of ‘Best User Experience’.

‘Innovation’ is not just a descriptor of our technology, but a deliberate approach that permeates our culture. We continue to think carefully about creating an environment that best enables our staff to be most happy and therefore productive. Life at SwiftKey is structured in a way that values each individual in the team; this includes our self-directed environment with flexible working hours and the freedom to work from home on Mondays, Thursday and Fridays. There’s also a wide range of staff benefits including (among other things) free food and ping-pong, regular internal and external talks, Special Effort Awards and £100 Productivity Vouchers for all staff. Our culture is one that values creative risk, complemented by the freedom and opportunity staff have to share their ideas in a meaningful way. Further, supporting our non-hierarchical structure of small teams, we ensure that the staff we recruit in the first place are passionate about their role in contributing to what we’re building here.

Whilst we’ve found innovation has to be an intentional focus, we balance that with the caveat that (by definition) it cannot be predictably ‘planned’. Subsequently, a sense of discovery, intrigue and fun is encouraged, not stifled, at SwiftKey. Every month we hold an Innovation Day where staff are free to pursue their own personal projects or hobbies, alone or in groups. This space for open-ended creativity has ended up producing some of our key innovations, which we most likely wouldn’t have dreamt up in a meeting room. A great example of this was our recent Aprils Fools joke, ‘SwiftKey Tilt’. What we loved about SwiftKey Tilt, was that although it was a joke, we were still able to deliver a clever and tangible feature for you to play with. This was the result of one of our dev’s playful work on an Innovation Day. You can see our follow-up blog with some of our Tilt users’ reactions here.

So what’s ahead for us? Well, rest assured that while we have one eye on all that we’re currently achieving, we’ve got the other firmly placed on the horizon of what’s possible for us. We’re enjoying massive success with our award-winning consumer app (SwiftKey), our first enterprise product (SwiftKey Healthcare), and our deals with top handset manufacturers (it was recently announced that our tech is powering the Samsung S4′s keyboard)… but that’s all just setting the scene for what’s ahead. If you’ve followed our progress at all, hopefully you got the message that we’re an ambitious bunch who are far from done. We’re around 100 staff now, all working hard on various areas of the company. SwiftKey’s technology understands language – this is a meeting point for the interaction between humans and the technology that is increasingly shaping our daily landscape. The growing number of language-based challenges our digital world presents are opportunities for our intelligent technology to bridge the communication gap.

We’ve shown that when we see an opportunity to use our technology to improve the world around us, we jump at it.

The SwiftKey Team

The post Bringing SwiftKey’s innovation into focus 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

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