SwiftKey has now received its second big update this month, rolling out as of March 28, which includes at least three new features that weren’t there in that other recent list of changes. The biggest of those, as with that other update, is a feature that’s traditionally been tied in with specific messaging or chat apps, rather than with the keyboard itself. Namely, users can now enter their current location for sharing with whoever it is they are talking to, directly from the keyboard and regardless of the application they’re using to chat. As of this writing, however, that will only work within the U.S. or India and there’s been no indication with regard to when or even if other regions will eventually be able to use it. For those that can access it, the addition should make it much easier to share that information without having to consider first whether the current app allows for that.
Moving beyond that feature, meanwhile, there’s another feature that should make meeting up an easier task, as well. That’s because, after updating the app, users will also be able to share a calendar event directly from the keyboard. Interestingly, this feature appears to be much more “outside of the box” since most messaging apps don’t include anything similar. In any case, the tool should simplify things further so that everybody who plans to meet up at a select location shows up on the right day and time. The final addition within the update is a bit different. It allows a contextual hold to be used on the keyboards predictive text bar to delete predictions that are comprised of more than one word. That may or may not make it easier to type things without accidentally using the wrong two-word combination but it’s bound to be popular with users whose speech patterns fall outside of the most common norms.
At this rate, SwiftKey seems to be well on its way to retaking a position among the most popular, top-rated keyboard apps available for the Android ecosystem. It isn’t quite there yet, though. So hopefully, the company has a few more tricks up its sleeves for future iterations – though its hard to imagine where it might improve from here.