Suggestions for the Developers

Skyeclad

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Jul 12, 2010
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As a Swiftkey Customer I have two major areas where I think the developers could improve upon.

The first one is voice to text.

1) While I like the option to translate voice to text it feels somewhat unrefined. One issue is that it often stops listening before I've finished speaking. I find myself speaking rapid fire with no interruptions in order to keep swiftkey listening.

2) While it's nice to have the 3 alternate options, in practice, it takes time to sort through the differences, find the version with the closest accuracy and select it. One suggestion would be to highlight in a different color the words that are in common and the words that are different.

3) Voice to Text accuracy overall is somewhat low. I seem to have better luck with Vlingo although this is still grading on a curve as no solution is 100% accurate. It seems like voice to text as a concept toes the fine line between being a time saver and being more trouble than it's worth.

The second one is Auto-Complete/Auto-Accept.

1) I'm not sure what the difference here is actually. Both descriptions sound like it does the same thing.
2) Here's my take, it's both amazing in it's corrective capability and sometimes infuriating when it replaces correctly spelled words with it's own suggestions, multiple times!! I think if the user spells a word once and has auto-complete on then it should replace the word only if it's not spelled correctly. If I change it back 2 times, it should leave the word alone even if it's not spelled correctly.
3) Again this is a fantastic feature that spells and auto-predicts the next logical word but if I end up with a text that makes no sense because I'm not policing the auto-complete vigilantly, it can feel somewhat foolish.
4) Email addresses. Swiftkey doesn't learn entire email address as one string but breaks it up into Joeblow @ gmail.com. This makes it frustrating to enter as you have to go back and delete the spaces that it puts between the parts of the address.

I hope these comments are taken under consideration...
 

joebraidwood

Swiftkey Developer
Sep 7, 2010
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Hi Skyeclad,

Thanks for your feedback.

We have a major improvement roadmap for SwiftKey and there are various features that we're planning to enhance as a result.

The issue with voice-to-text is that the keyboard uses Google's engine for this; we're not a voice-to-text company, but included the feature who those who find it useful. We may explore how to best present the guessed input screen going forward, but this isn't core to our ambitions for the app.

As for AutoComplete/AutoAccept behavior, the only difference really is the fact that AutoAccept works without any character input for a new word. This means you can repeatedly tap the space bar to write sentences. With AutoComplete you need to have inpurted at least one character.

> I think if the user spells a word once and has auto-complete on then it should replace the word only if it's not spelled correctly. If I change it back 2 times, it should leave the word alone even if it's not spelled correctly.

This slightly misunderstands the way SwiftKey learns. If you change it back, you need to press the left hand prediction button in blue for SwiftKey to learn the new predicted word. This may take a few attempts to displace a more probable word. So say you had a friend called "Tha", because this is so commonly going to be "the" or "that", it would take several attempts to displace the alternatives as most probable in the context you're writing in.

> Email addresses. Swiftkey doesn't learn entire email address as one string but breaks it up into Joeblow @ gmail.com.

We're aware of this and hope to alter the '@' behavior moving forward to make this less of an issue.

Thanks,

Joe
 
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Skyeclad

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LThe issue with voice-to-text is that the keyboard uses Google's engine for this; we're not a voice-to-text company That's cool. Any chance that the user could select Vlingo's voice to text from Swiftkey or is that a crazy idea?


>This slightly misunderstands the way SwiftKey earns. If you change it back, you need to press the left hand prediction button in blue for SwiftKey to learn the new predicted word. This may take a few attempts to displace a more probable word. So say you had a friend called"Tha", because this is so commonly going to be"the" or "that", it would take several attempts to displace the alternatives as most probable in the context you're writing in I would say that this is how I handle it when it's a word that I know is going to be a problem but when I'm typing fast and I'm typing common words, I occasionally stumble into a word that is spelled correctly but for some reason, SK doesn't ike it so I have found myself "fighting" the keyboard on what I believed to be common words. words.

I don't have a good example off the top of my mind, but there was this one time where SK replaced a word that I spelled correctly. I didn't notice it right away so when I later saw the error I just assumed I typo'd what I meant the first time so in the next text, I wrote oops, I meant to say "was" not "water" and I hit enter but the word was changed again so instead it came out oops I meant to say "water" not "water"[/ B]. The other person was so confused and just didn't get what I was saying. I felt like I was fighting with SK and had to slow down and review what I was doing. Btw, the words weren't was and water but you get the point. Anyway, I know I have to spend a little more time with the keyboard to get the hang of it but at that moment I felt that the predictive text overstepped ts bounds and was being overly aggressive with a correctly spelled word that maybe didn't yet have in its statistical engine?

>We're aware of this and hope to alter the '@ behavior moving forward to make this behavior moving forward to make this less of an issue.

That's cool, long email addresses are an area where I think SK could excel over something like Swype where you can get easily lost in tracing al those letters.

One last suggestion, could you add an option to adjust the time a longpress takes to show the other characters? I feel it's just takes a tiny bit onger than I would like.

Hey just a final note, I do like this keyboard and has become my primary input choice. I appreciate many things such as the large spacebar, the automatic punctuation when you talk the spacebar. Keep up the good work!
 

zemitras

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Oct 14, 2010
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Hi there!

4) Email addresses. Swiftkey doesn't learn entire email address as one string but breaks it up into Joeblow @ gmail.com. This makes it frustrating to enter as you have to go back and delete the spaces that it puts between the parts of the address.

This is a very good suggestion, the most (and maybe the only) annoying thing I found on SwiftKey. In my native language (Portuguese) there are words wich include the "-" like for example, "respeita-me", "amo-te", "faz-me", "quero-te", and I would like to Swiftkey to be able to memorise the word completly instead of having the present behaviour, where we have to remove every space.

For instance, when I'm writing the word "quero-te" it's like this:
-> Write "quero" and press the complete bar
-> remove the space
-> write "-" or press the complete bar
-> remove the space
-> Write "te"

It's kind of annoying, but anyway it isn't annoying enought for me to use another keyboard :)
 

Skyeclad

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Jul 12, 2010
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4) Email addresses. Swiftkey doesn't learn entire email address as one string but breaks it up into Joeblow @ gmail.com. This makes it frustrating to enter as you have to go back and delete the spaces that it puts between the parts of the address.

Just wondering if this bug was fixed or going to be fixed in an upcoming version? Thanks.