TouchPal announced a new keyboard back at MWC 2018 that takes a page out of the Google Assistant’s playbook and offers an alternative when it comes to A.I. interactions through text. It hasn’t quite hit the Play Store yet and there still no firm launch date attached to the project. However, it should prove useful for anybody interested in A.I. in-chat interactions who doesn’t want to use Google’s Allo. The company has already released a video showing at least some of its capabilities and it appears to work similarly to the Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa.
What sets TouchPal’s “A.I. Keyboard” apart is that, as the name implies, it builds A.I. directly into the keyboard. That should make it much more helpful than other similar applications that require a specific chat app to be used to get that kind of functionality. For example, if a couple of users are discussing going for a hike or meeting up for lunch, they can ask the assistant to check the weather within the chat. That would appear to be possible in nearly any application where a keyboard is available. That broadens the discussion to include consideration for the weather so that the hike can be postponed or an indoor eatery can be chosen if the weather isn’t going to be good. It also seems to include the Google Assistant’s ability to return searches, such as for restaurants or movie theaters. Users can conduct real-time conversions for currency and other functions as well. So this may end up being among the most useful keyboard applications to hit Android yet.
Meanwhile, all of the other great features from TouchPal’s previous keyboards appear to remain intact. For those who haven’t already checked out the keyboard, those range from custom dictionaries and theming to intelligent cloud-based word prediction that gets better over time. Beyond that, TouchPal has been very good at including tons of emoji and ASCII art into its keyboards and its smart features support both traditional and Swype-like typing. Best of all, its intelligent predictions can be contextual, meaning users need to type far less as it can predict sentences with improved accuracy over time. The new A.I. Keyboard may not be available yet but anybody interested in checking out some of the other features TouchPal has to offer can do so by referring to the banner below.