Swiftkey has been one of the most popular keyboards on Android for quite some time, and while they continue to improve their own keyboard with new features, they’re announcing today a new keyboard called Clarity keyboard, which Swiftkey says is aimed at giving users a more simple way to type with a focus only on what the user is writing. Clarity keyboard is currently in beta status and is strictly an experimental offering as part of their new project called Greenhouse, which Swiftkey hopes to use to develop new and innovative ideas and help grow them into something unique, fresh, and inviting to users.
At the moment Clarity keyboard is their first project that is out in the open and available for users to download onto their Android devices, but more apps are on the way. While the idea of an intelligent keyboard is nothing new as these have been around for years, it’s some of the features which clarity keyboard offers which might spark interest from users. Things like multi-word auto-correct which checks the last few words of what a user types so the keyboard can correct them as needed. Should the auto-correction not be what a user wants, they can simply “undo” the auto-correct by tapping the backspace key and returning to the original typed set of words.
In addition to these two features Clarity also offers the capability to learn from people’s typing experiences, including slang and other normally used vocabulary. This in itself is something that most third-party keyboards have, so it would be odd to have something like Clarity not include it. While Clarity might seem a bit limited at the moment compared to some other keyboard apps, more features have the potential to be included in the future, and part of the purpose of the Greenhouse project is to get feedback from users about what they like and don’t like so as to help shape the development of something like Clarity. The idea is to let users test the early working beta versions of any projects so the development team can see how things actually work in the hands of users, as well as possibly gather ideas for other stuff to add.
