


You can drag to make the keyboard bigger or smaller, change the color and design, and more.įleksy: Here we have the keyboard that set the Guinness world record for fastest phone typing. (The built-in Android keyboard now has this feature, too.)Īi.type: This keyboard also offers predictive text and swiping but it also provides spelling and grammar corrections. That is, you drag your finger quickly and sloppily across the keys on the glass, hitting the letters you want as you go the software figures out which word you must have been going for. They attempt to learn from your typing to make their predictions more accurate. They offer very good predictive text (including three words above the keyboard that the software thinks are the most likely you're about to type).

Swype and SwiftKey: These may be the most famous alternate keyboards. Herewith: some capsule summaries of the different approaches. You can have speed without much accuracy (dictation), you can have accuracy but not much speed (on-screen keyboards)-and sometimes you can have software assistance to get your typing done faster and more accurately (predictive-text keyboards).īoth Android phones and iPhones let you install alternate on-screen keyboards to replace the one that came with your set. In this month's Scientific American I took a big-picture look at all the different ways people have invented to input text on phones that don't have keyboards.
