SwiftKey is one of the more popular third-party keyboards available on Android (as well as iOS), and today the company announced a pretty huge milestone. They now support over 150 different languages with their Android version of their keyboard. That will likely extend to the iOS version in a few updates though (since languages aren’t that different from OS to OS).
In SwiftKey’s blog post announcing this milestone, they talked with one of their engineers, Julien Baley, who has built 48 of the 150 languages in use by SwiftKey. He stated that the first few language models he did for SwiftKey would take him around 4 months to build. However, now he has got the process down pretty solid, and can round out about 10 models in two weeks, which is pretty impressive to say the least. That’s about one language model per working day. Many may wonder how many words are needed to build a new language keyboard, and that magic number would be around 5,000. Baley says that he pulls words from news reports that are available online and other content that is publicly available. Additionally, once users start using that particular language SwiftKey is able to grow the vocabulary a bit faster.
SwiftKey has been around, almost since the beginning of Android and it has vastly improved over the years. Going from a simple keyboard that had a better layout than those that were pre-installed on Android devices, to being a much better keyboard than just about everything out there. Especially when it comes to autocorrect. SwiftKey learns from your vocabulary and writing, so it can not only predict what you are trying to type, but also predict and entire sentence for you. It has really evolved over the years, and it’s only getting better. SwiftKey also has emoji prediction. So you can type an emoji like “tired” and it’ll give you the appropriate emoji. This is much easier than hunting down the emoji you want to use. SwiftKey is available on Google Play, and nowadays, it likely has all of the languages that you speak or type.