In what way is it better/different, compared to the default Google keyboard (which is not too bad, either)?

It's hard to tell exactly without knowing what's going on under the hood, but what has significantly got better in recent months for me is:

- Individualized predictions (it clearly picks up things I often write, including slang and abbreviations)

- Multi-words predictions ("What time" completed by "is it" instead of "is", "it")

- Context dependent predictions: predicts email addresses when I'm in the "To" field of an email, predicts an URL when I'm in the browser's omnibox, etc.

- Multi language support (I can mix English and French in my texts... Happens all the time)

> - Multi language support (I can mix English and French in my texts... Happens all the time)

That's a killer feature for me. Changing keyboard languages every time gets old fast.

> - Context dependent predictions

Actually, that’s not a feature of the IME/Keyboard.

The dev of the app has to set textUri, or textEmail, or textShortMessage on each field.

Here’s a list of all contexts possible: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/TextVi...

The app provides the context id, SK provides the predictions, using context-specific models.

Yes, but that’s not much of a feature. You don’t have to detect anything, you can just use a different prediction model for each context, and train each separately.

Are you kidding? The default Google keyboard doesn't remember what I type! I go to gym and type "lat pulldown" - I've done this at least 50 times, yet each time I type "lat p" it cannot figure out that what I want to type.

It's trying to tell you that you should be doing pull-ups or chin-ups if you want your upper back to look decent.

I'd like to know as well. I used to use SwiftKey a few years back and loved it. I switched to a Windows phone for awhile then back to my Android. After using the stock Android keyboard for a few months I thought I'd try SwiftKey. Without question, I found SwiftKey required far, far more corrections than the WP or Android phone did. I had to stop swiping at least twice as much to fix an incorrect word.

I just thought that other keyboards had sufficiently caught up since I stopped using it, and SwiftKey didn't improve. What did I miss?

So, a big part of what makes SwiftKey work as well for me as it does is the learning features. I use those features to scan my Facebook / Twitter / E-mail, and it's able to learn how to predict my typing quirks better than anything else I've ever used.

Is it possible that you skipped that step?

Very possible. I just installed it and started typing as per normal, I didn't do anything special to make it learn my style. Unfortunately the first (and only) two days I used it the output just wasn't good enough. Maybe I'll try it one more time and stick with it for two weeks while exploring learning options.

I tried it on the iPhone and gave up on account of its sometimes rather imaginative interpretations of what I was trying to say. I think it can be quicker but a bit unpredictable.

You need to use it for a while to see better predictions. If you type in the same way often, it gets really really good at doing the typing for you.

It writes whole sentences for me with maybe a few letters of guidance sometimes. It's just immensely smarter than any other predictions I've seen.

Multiple languages without switching sold it to me 6 years ago. It also smartly scans the SMS messages which means it will learn how I write casually in a dialect of my mother language, not just the dictionary version of it.

No other keyboard did that.

Same here. The seamless multi-language support is reason enough for me to use swiftkey.