The SwiftKey team has just unveiled a new feature for its Android application, a feature that makes sharing a lot easier. Once a new update arrives to your SwiftKey application, you will be able to search the web right from the SwiftKey app, no need to navigate to a browser, which will certainly speed up sharing links, that’s for sure. Many of you probably already know that such a feature has been available for Gboard for quite some time now, well, SwiftKey is now joining the fold as well. Now, considering that you will basically get a search window once you hit the search button in SwiftKey, this is not only useful for sharing links, but you can also take a screenshot of whatever you found online and share it via SwiftKey in a single tap. Now, in order to use this feature, you’ll need to open up SwiftKey (hit the text box to start writing), and then tap on the “+” icon in the top-left of the app. At that point, you need to select a search icon, and type in whatever you’d like to search for online. Now, unlike Gboard, which uses Google Search, SwiftKey uses Bing in order to search the web, which is logical considering that SwiftKey is now Microsoft’s application. It is worth noting that this feature is not available to everyone on the globe just yet, though, SwiftKey says that it is available to users in 11 countries, says the company, including the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Australia, Japan, Brazil, India, Turkey, and Spain. We don’t really know why didn’t SwiftKey make this feature global, to begin with, as it basically released it in all the biggest markets out there, so it’s not exactly a test of any kind… but there you have it, the rest of you will have to wait a bit longer.
Background: Microsoft has been updating the SwiftKey app consistently thorough 2018, the company had recently integrated Microsoft Translator into the app, in order to make it compete with Gboard and Google Translate, and now the company built-in search, once again to bring the app to Gboard’s level when it comes to specific features, even though SwiftKey is a great keyboard, and some would say better at prediction than Gboard… but that depends on who you ask. Prior to integrating Microsoft Translator, Microsoft actually included Android P emoji support in the app, and those are all changes that have arrived to the app in the second half of the year. Both Google Translate and search have been built into Gboard for quite some time now, but SwiftKey is catching up in that regard.
Impact: SwiftKey is most definitely one of the best keyboard applications for Android, it has one of the best typing predictions out there, and now it has a ton of really useful features as well. Having search built into the is quite useful, and it’s a nice addition by Microsoft. It remains to be seen what is the next step for SwiftKey, but at this point, the app is really full of features, and not a single major feature is missing compared to the competition.
UPDATE: Do note that two of our employees received this feature as well, and they do not live in any of these countries, so it’s possible that you will as well.
