Still typing? You could be Swyping

The unexpected success of Southwark start-up Swiftkey at last week’s Webby awards — the Oscars of the internet — highlights a market of growing importance for tech watchers and consumers alike: virtual typing apps.

Some phone buyers have long maintained they can never get used to typing on a touchscreen as quickly or accurately as they do with real keys. But with research suggesting that in four years 97 per cent of smartphones will at least feature a touchscreen, the task of making the best possible virtual typing system is an increasingly pressing one, and developers are rising to the challenge.

SwiftKey, which was founded by Cambridge graduates Jon Reynolds, 26, and Dr Ben Medlock, 33, uses sophisticated language technology to anticipate what a user is going to type next, based on the things they have typed before in emails, texts and on Twitter and Facebook.

It is available on any phone that runs the Android operating system — the more rigid platform used by Apple doesn’t allow users to choose a different keyboard — although it hopes to spread to other devices.

Jason Reynolds, the editor of CNET UK, says the market has developed because “when the first Android phones came out, the keyboards weren’t that great”, although he says they have since improved, partly thanks to tie-ups with third-party developers.

Swiftkey claims to have saved its users more than 50 billion keystrokes, allowing each user to touch the screen a third fewer times than they would have done using the default manufacturer keyboards. Consumers can check the figures themselves in the app’s settings.

The app was the most downloaded in the Google store in the lead up to Christmas, and Reynolds told the Standard that he is confident his app is a better text predictor than anything else in the market. It competes directly with dozens of alternative keyboard developers, as well as the standard manufacturer ones, to a few of whom Swiftkey sells its technology. Swype, an innovative typing tool that allows users to trace their fingers between the required keys in one motion rather than tapping repeatedly, has had millions of converts, and its CEO claims to have reached 55 words per minute using Swype, roughly three short of the world texting record.

FlexT9 — whose name is a play on the old T9 technology on most phones — is another serious competitor.

If the third generation of Swiftkey — currently being tested by its “VIP” users — is as popular as the current one, then Reynolds and his crack team of Cambridge nerds in Southwark will have the digits of the world at their fingertips.