Android: SwiftKey keyboard app gets 100,000 downloads in first week
Posted by: Phat^Trance in Android, Android Apps, Press releases, Video
An innovative text prediction app that takes the strain out of touchscreen typing has exceeded 100,000 downloads in its first week on Google’s Android Market, its developers said Wednesday.
SwiftKey, created by British start-up company TouchType, was the most downloaded Android app last week according to the popular blog ‘Android and Me’. It was also chosen as a top Android pick by several other major tech sites, including Gizmodo, Tech Radar and Brothersoft Mobile.
“The last week has been phenomenal,” said Jon Reynolds, TouchType’s co-founder and CEO. “We started TouchType because we knew there must be a better way to type on a touchscreen phone. As well as exceeding all download expectations, we have been overwhelmed by the positive feedback about SwiftKey. It has already established itself as a market-leading text entry solution.”
Tech blog Engadget heralded SwiftKey’s launch as the introduction of “world class predictive text” for Android phones, saying the app has “an uncanny ability to guess what your next word will be… In our early tests, we’re pretty darn impressed.”
TechRadar named SwiftKey as the best keyboard app on Android. Placing SwiftKey at the top of its Android apps of the week, Gizmodo said: “The star feature of SwiftKey is its predictive text – it literally learns the way you type.”
What makes SwiftKey revolutionary is TouchType’s patent-pending language technology, which understands how words are combined within sentences and continually learns as a user writes.
“We’ve analysed over 50 billion words in nine major languages to build the models that drive our prediction engine,” said Ben Medlock, TouchType’s Chief Technical Officer. “SwiftKey is the first text entry app on the market to harness the incredible power of statistical language processing. It takes predictive text to a whole new level, resulting in an unparalleled user experience.”
TouchType says the user feedback it has received so far has been incredibly positive. “I think this is the best way to text ever invented,” one user said. “SwiftKey Beta is probably the best thing that happened to Android in recent times,” commented another.
The beta is currently available to all smartphones running the Google Android platform. TouchType says it is working hard to make a series of enhancements in response to beta feedback before a full paid launch later in the year. The first update to the beta was released Wednesday.
