So, up front, I’ll admit I’m one of those guys that gets hung up on tiny, largely irrelevant quirks in apps. Yeah, I’m great fun at parties.

So, what’s your favourite keyboard app? I keep coming back to SwiftKey. I feel like it’s the best typing experience for me, with fairly accurate prediction and correction — although it’s far from perfect, of course. I’ve seen plenty of people complain about it, and apart from Microsoft adding Bing to it, it’s not received much in the way of innovation or useful updates since they bought it.

I particularly like that a long press on the backspace key will delete one whole word at a time, speeding up the longer you hold it down. I simply haven’t found the backspace methods on Gboard or the Samsung keyboard (which used to be Swype I guess?) to be as predictable or reliable. Gboard’s swipe back doesn’t feel predictable in what it will do, and Samsung’s backspace is more like iOS.

I also find SwiftKey to be the best at remembering sequences of words; if I start typing my address, it’ll generally remember each successive word and offer it as the main prediction on the top row. Samsung and Gboard both do that to some extent, but I just haven’t found them to be as reliably predictable in the results.

On the other hand, I hate that SwiftKey doesn’t can’t add an image to its clipboard. Copying and pasting images is a breeze with both Gboard and Samsung’s keyboard, but with SwiftKey I pretty much have to download/screengrab and upload any image I want to insert in a chat or post.

So, that’s it. Rant over! What’s your favourite keyboard app, and does anything irritate you about it?

  • @alokirEnglish
    5•1 year ago

    I tried SwiftKey for about a week or so a month ago but I’m too used to GBoard to make the switch.

    What I like about GB that SK doesn’t have or is too different:

    • speech to text integrated into the keyboard. The Bing app is probably the best at this, especially for my non-native English accent, too bad SK doesn’t have its own implementation
    • I can set up the keys to show their long press symbols
    • the colon character is at an awkward place for my finger to reach
    • GB’s swipe function can figure out much more easily what language I wanted to type in
    • SK shows every possible accented version of the character that I long pressed on, and the one that I wanted was usually at an awkward place to reach. GB on the other hand sorts those of my native language right next to the original character, and only offers a few that I never use.
    • @SpendiesEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      SwiftKey does your first two bullets and has full on Bing chatgpt built into the keyboard including getting it to compose messages for you and gives you options to rewrite your messages in different tones like professional, casual, funny, etc.

      I feel like most of your issues with swiftkey could be fixed by playing around around with themes/settings a bit to find what fits your needs.

      • @alokirEnglish
        3•1 year ago

        It seems like you were right, it was the theme that I chose that didn’t support showing the long press symbols, even though I enabled them in the settings.

        Regarding the voice to text, for me it just opens Google’s voice input, it doesn’t seem like it has its own built in VTT.