Great news!

The Guardian have just announced that SwiftKey has reached the final three for “Best Startup Business” in their 2012 Digital Innovation Awards. This category is for “technology startups and early stage companies with a truly innovative proposition”. The awards seek out cutting-edge accomplishments in the digital space, in line with the Guardian’s recent move to a digital-first strategy.

Last year’s winner was Shutl, a revolutionary delivery company which allows you to shop online with all your favorite retailers and have your items delivered within 90 minutes.

The winners will be announced on 22nd March.

Hey there SwiftKey fans,

Today’s update brings you new and improved language models, which focus more on the informal, chatty style of communication that people use when typing on their phones. These “conversational models” should make your predictions and corrections even more spookily accurate. After updating SwiftKey make sure you are using the most up-to-date language models by going to Settings > Languages & layouts, hitting the Menu button, and choosing “Update languages”.

We’re also celebrating hitting one million personalizations. When you personalize SwiftKey using your Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, Gmail emails or your blog posts, SwiftKey creates a truly personal language model based on the words and phrases that you use, so the predictions and corrections that it provides are unique to you. To personalize go to Settings > Personalization.

In celebration of this, we are offering 25% off SwiftKey X and SwiftKey Tablet X for this weekend only. If your friends or family are not yet on SwiftKey now is the perfect time.

Cheers,
Charlie

Fantastic news – we’ve been nominated for a GSMA Global Mobile Award at this year’s Mobile World Congress!

This is pretty much the most prestigious award in the mobile industry – we’re up against the world’s top app developers. Other nominations in the “Most Innovative Mobile App” category include Google Wallet and Shazam – you can find the full list of nominees here. It’s hard to overstate how amazing it is to be recognised as being amongst the top players in the app world.

We’ll find out if we’ve won on Feb 28th during MWC, where the awards will be given out by comedian and songwriter Tim Minchin.

We are very excited about this, and very grateful for all your support during the last year.

Fingers crossed!
Charlie

Is your resolution to write that novel you’ve been talking about, to post more on your blog, or just to keep in touch with friends and family? SwiftKey takes the hassle out of typing on your phone and can make it easier to stick at it.

Here are some resolutions from the SwiftKey team, along with the apps that will help:

Listen to more new music – Spotify is a great way to discover new bands, especially now that it integrates with Facebook and you can see what your friends are listening to. 

Travel more adventurously – TripIt talks the hassle out of complex travel itineraries. 

Exercise more – Endomondo Sports Tracker uses GPS to track how far and how fast you run/walk/cycle. 

Save money – daily deals like Groupon offer big discounts and can be a great way to discover new restaurants or stores, just remember to check the T&Cs to make sure you’ll be able to use the voucher. 

Read more news and blogs – Pulse is a great way to monitor lots of sources in one place. 

Check out new restaurants and bars – Yelp helps you to find places to eat and drink in unfamiliar areas. 

Practise the guitar more – gStrings is a simple but effective guitar-tuner. 

Be more organised – 1password helps you to keep track of all of your passwords and Evernote is our favorite note-taking app. 

Don’t get parking fines – RingGo lets you pay for parking without going back to your car (this one only works in the UK, sorry guys).

Hello everyone,

Today is the second (and final) day that we’re offering SwiftKey X for just 10¢/10p on the Android Market around the world. This is in celebration of the amazing 10 billion download milestone on the Market.

Google have also circulated a fantastic infographic about the achievement, which among other things shows that since our launch, we’ve helped Android users save over 20,000,000,000 keystrokes! Check it out:

Cheers!
Joe

We have already blogged about what your typing heatmap shows, now let’s take a look at these numbers.

Efficiency is the original SwiftKey stat – we’ve been showing you how efficient you are since the very beginning. Efficiency is calculated by looking at the number of characters you’ve entered (how much you’ve typed) and how many times you had to tap the keyboard to do it (keystrokes). If you press the screen 30 times to write 50 characters then your keystrokes saved number is 20 and we say that you are 40% (20/50) more efficient. The more that you choose predictions instead of typing out a word in full, the higher your efficiency will be.

Typos corrected does exactly what it says on the tin. How many characters has SwiftKey changed when correcting your typos? If you type “Amdriif” and SwiftKey corrects it to “Android” then SwiftKey has corrected the m, the i, and the f, so that’s 3 typos corrected. If you miss out a letter and SwiftKey adds it in, or you double-type a letter and SwiftKey takes one out, that’s also counted. If you tend to type without looking at the predictions and rely on SwiftKey’s awesome context-led auto-correct, your typos corrected number will be high.

Words predicted counts the number of words that SwiftKey has predicted for you without you having to type any letters at all. If you are a prediction-led typist then this number will be high.

Words completed 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 is something that will happen for both prediction-led precise typists and rapid typists.

What kind of a typist are you? Do you type efficiently and choose predictions whenever they occur? Or do you type fast and let SwiftKey fix your typos? You can go into Settings -> Advanced and choose your typing style to make sure that SwiftKey is working in the best possibly way to suit your unique way of typing.

Hope you found this useful,
Cheers,
Charlie

TouchType CEO Jon Reynolds and CTO Dr Ben Medlock

Big news from the team behind SwiftKey today! Following an incredible 24-hour promotion to celebrate Android’s 10bn app download milestone, which saw SwiftKey X shoot back up to the top of the charts, we’re pleased to announce that our company TouchType has closed a new round of funding.

We’ve secured an additional $2.4 million (£1.5m) in Series A investment from an internal round led by London-based Octopus Investments. You can read about it on Venture Beat, Tech Crunch, mocoNews, or see our press release on MarketWire.

In addition to the revenue that we already generate, we’ll be using the funding to focus on the next phase of growth and development for SwiftKey and our company. We plan to strengthen our executive, commercial and technical teams with the new investment, increasing their worldwide presence, particularly in the US and Asia.

We also plan to improve the capabilities and features of our SwiftKey apps and the Fluency language platform that underpins them, while continuing to innovate in the fields of natural language processing, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

This comes after an astounding year for the business. We have had some great success with SwiftKey – frequently being in the top 10 apps over the last year, and repeatedly hitting the top spot globally. We’ve also licensed our technology to a number of major OEMs including Vizio.

Our focus now is developing SwiftKey to make it even better for users like you, extending the capabilities of Fluency, and securing further licensing deals.

In addition to Octopus, and following considerable internal demand, our funding round was supported by several of Europe’s leading angel investors and VCs including: Cambridge Capital Group; Jon Craton, Cramer Systems founder; Nick Hynes and Carl Uminski, CEO and COO founders of Somo Agency; Richard Brennan, former CMO of Orange Group; and Andrew Thornton, barrister with Erskine Chambers.

For press inquiries, please see our company contact us page.

Cheers,
Joe

Today is a big day for the Android ecosystem. Google has just confirmed that since its launch three years ago, the Android Market has now had over 10 BILLION downloads.

It also comes off the back of an amazing milestone for SwiftKey. Yesterday we confirmed that our users have now entered over 100 BILLION characters while using our keyboard. That’s enough letters to get from Earth to the Moon if printed in 12 point font. A BIG number.

And to add to that, we’ve just had an amazing week in the Android charts, where we became the world’s top paid app on the Android Market after an awesome Thanksgiving promotion.

We think this is all very awesome, and so to celebrate we’re taking part in an unprecedented promotion. For the next 24 hours, SwiftKey X will be available on the Android Market for just 10¢ (or similar low prices globally). That’s 95% off the $3.99 list price.

The Android Market is running this promotional period for the next 10 days, where each day 10 different premium apps will be featured. So if you’ve yet to get your hands on the full version of SwiftKey X, now would be a very good time!

Cheers,
Joe

The latest versions of SwiftKey X and SwiftKey Tablet X let you see your typing heatmap – a visualization of how you type. But what does the heatmap mean?

A new, clean heatmap starts off looking like this. At the centre of each key is a perfect circle.

As you use your keyboard, SwiftKey learns how you interact with your screen and adjusts its behaviour accordingly. If you tend to hit a little high on one key, a little low on another, a little to the right or left with others, SwiftKey will compensate for this and figure out which key you were aiming for. We call this “Input Modelling” and it’s just one of many ways that SwiftKey makes typing easier and faster. There’s no need to be accurate. Just aim at roughly the right keys in roughly the right order and SwiftKey will take the context of what you are writing, put it together with its knowledge of what you’ve written before, and work out what you meant to type.

The blobs on your heatmap become morphed to fit the region that you tend to press when you want to use that key, thereby representing the unique way in which you use your keyboard and the unique way that your SwiftKey responds to your presses.

Let’s see some examples, starting with Patrick’s heatmap. Patrick is one of our developers and he’s the best at explaining how heatmaps and input modelling work.

Patrick says: “I’m a fairly typical rapid thumb typist. My SwiftKeyX heatmap shows how my typing style is quite haphazard, aiming for maximum speed, letting SwiftKey do the hard work. However, there are a few features which SwiftKey can use to really zero in on how I type. It’s clear that I am a lot more accurate with my right thumb than my left, due to the fact that I support most of my phone with my right hand, so the keyboard position relative to my right thumb is more constant than to my left thumb. You can also see a fairly typical “over there Q” as I like to call it! When I want to hit Q I know that it’s in the top left, so I just hit somewhere over there! This leads to a fairly spread out blob, which represents how variable my touch can be when I want to hit Q. Only SwiftKey X knows my typing style well enough to keep up!”

I think his accuracy is pretty good, especially compared to mine!

This is my heatmap from my phone. I am a hunt-and-peck kind of typist, I hold my phone in one hand and type with the index finger of my other hand. What you can see here is that I often aim a bit too low when going for the keys. So SwiftKey will adjust for that and know that if I hit somewhere between two keys I was probably aiming for the higher of the two. I also suffer from what Patrick refers to as an “over there Q”.

One more heatmap, this time from our Community Manager Evan.

Evan tends to type one-handed with his right thumb, and you can see how his keypress areas skew from the bottom left to the top right. You can also see how he is less accurate when bending his thumb back to hit the L in the middle right and when stretching across to reach the A all the way over on the left-hand side.

We hope you find this useful, and we’d love to see your heatmaps and hear what you make of them. You can find your heatmap by going to Settings> SwiftKey stats > My typing heatmap, and you can tweet us by using @SwiftKey. Remember – the messier your heatmap the more SwiftKey is working to make typing easier for you.

Cheers, Charlie

We’re having a great week at SwiftKey HQ and we wanted to say “thank you” to all of our users for their great support, and an especially big “hello” to all of our new users!

Right now SwiftKey X is the #1 paid app on Android Market in the UK, and number 2 in the US – we’d love to hear what number we are in your country!

SwiftKey X is also:

• Featured on the web-based Android Market apps front page (SwiftKey Tablet X is featured under “Tablet Apps”)
• Editor’s Choice – described by Android as “the best apps on Android Market, as chosen by our staff”
• Staff Pick within the Market app
• The top-grossing non-game app in the UK
• And we’re an Android Market “Top Developer”

What’s more, we are still offering SwiftKey X and SwiftKey Tablet X at half-price, so if you know anyone who still doesn’t have SwiftKey tell them to hurry because the sale will have to end soon.

Cheers!
Charlie