Android Jellybean's gesture keyboard

I am now the proud owner of a Nexus 4 smartphone. I'll save the upgrade story for another post and focus here on a comparison between Swype and the built-in gesture-based keyboard of Android 4.2 Jellybean.

No more upgrade blues

Before I got the Nexus 4, I had used Swype for all mobile text input for nearly three years. The most obvious difference - and perhaps the most important - has already been mentioned. Not only was Swype not built-in. It was a memory-hungry add-on which was not even available in the Google Play store, and I always had problems installing upgrades. Having my preferred keyboard as an integrated component of the mobile operating system is a huge step forward.

Word recognition is excellent

The Android 4.2 gesture-typing keyboard doesn't have Swype's extended gestures, such as swiping above the keyboard to capitalise a letter. (Instead, you have to tap the Caps key.) Nor does it have Swype's very useful secondary Select-Copy-Paste keyboard. But it is blazingly fast and seems to do a pretty good job of picking the right word from my approximate gestures.

The Android gesture keyboard - better than Swype in some respects

Handles mulitiple languages better than Swype

All in all, as an experienced Swype user I have found it fairly easy to make the switch to Android Jellybean's built-in gesture keyboard. Some functions - notably, switching between different languages - are handled significantly better than in Swype. There are one or two rough edges, and I expect the keyboard to improve in subsequent versions of the operating system, as Google responds to user feedback. But it is already extremely good. Most important of all, my gesture typing speed is already back up to my previous Swype level... or maybe a little bit faster.

Pro tips

I have not managed to find a complete guide to the Jellybean gesture keyboard's functions anywhere on the web, and I have the feeling that there is more to be discovered, but here is what I have worked out so far:

• As in Swype, to write a double letter make a little squiggle gesture on the relevant key.
• To engage Caps Lock, double-tap rapidly on the Caps key.
• If the keyboard consistently fails to recognise a particular word, let your finger linger on the missed letter. For example, I found that the keyboard regularly interprets 'app' as 'asp'. To correct this, I just have to slow down the gesture as I pass over the letter 'p'.
• For an extended selection of matching words, swipe up from the suggestions bar and then release the gesture on the correct match.
• You can add new words to your personal dictionary. The first time you use a word that is not in the built-in dictionary, you'll have to tap out the letters one by one. The word will appear on the left of the suggestion bar. Tap to accept the word and then tap a second time to save it to the personal dictionary.
• Words can also be added to (or deleted from) the personal dictionary directly. Go to Settings > Language & input > Personal dictionaries and tap the + sign top-right to add the new word. You can even add a shortcut, which is especially useful for words that include non-alphabetic characters such as email addresses and Twitter hashtags. It can also be used for commonly typed phrases such as "Thanks for your message". It seems strange that you cannot access your personal dictionary straight from keyboard setting (see below), but perhaps this will be added in a future upgrade.
• In normal use, there's no need to enter spaces after each word. They are inserted automatically. But for full predictive text input, add a space and the keyboard will suggest the next word. I am not certain whether this is just a gimmick or whether it could actually be useful. That depends, I suppose, on the extent to which the system is able to learn the user's style from his actual word choices.
• To correct a mistyped word earlier in your text, double-tap the word to select it and then choose Replace... This brings up a short list of alternative matches or allows you to delete the word altogether if the word you want is not included in the list. (To delete the selected word directly, just hit the Delete key.)
• A tap-hold on some keys brings up a list of secondary characters - numbers, accented versions of the letter (but annoyingly not the corresponding capital letter). Tap-hold the 'new line' key to jump to the end of the previous or next paragraph.
• Tap-hold the mic key to access keyboard settings. I regularly write in French as well as in English, and it was easy to add the second dictionary and keyboard layout from the impressive list of input languages. With more than one input language activated, a language selector key appears on the left of the space bar. Tapping this key cycles through the active languages. Multilingualism is something the Jellybean keyboard handles very much better than Swype.
• By default, the Android gesture keyboard offers a 'Dynamic floating preview' of the suggested word over your gesture. I can see that this might be useful (or reassuring) to someone completely new to gesture-based text entry, but I found it distracting and keep it turned off.

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Text entry

I don't know about you, but for me an Android smartphone is first and foremost a productivity tool. That means I have to be able to write on it - comfortably, accurately and fast. Amazingly, it turns out that I can write almost as quickly on the phone as on a PC. I no longer need a laptop.

When I bought my HTC Desire two years ago, I never thought I would be able to use it for serious writing. Mostly, what I had in mind was content consumption - reading blogs and listening to podcasts. I would write SMS messages, of course. Perhaps the occasional tweet and a brief email message from time to time, but nothing more than that.

My initial experience confirmed this. I found it even harder to type on the standard Android keyboard than I had done on the physical keys of my Nokia feature phone. Landscape orientation made the keyboard bigger, but it was awkward to hold the phone that way, and I still seemed to hit the wrong keys too often. The standard keyboard's auto-correction was fairly good, but not good enough.

The standard Android 2.2 (Froyo) keyboard in landscape orientation. Big, but awkward.

Then I heard Gina Trapani talking about Swype on the podcast This Week in Google. She said that it had doubled her text entry speed. Even watching a video on the Swype website didn't fully convey how natural the Swype keyboard feels in use. But they were offering free registration to the beta programme, and as I've already admitted I'm the penny-pinching type. So I went ahead and installed Swype on my Android phone.

Using the standard Android keyboard (left) and Swype to compose an SMS message to my friend William.

It would be too much to say that I have never looked back. A non-standard and frequently malfunctioning installation process and a number of 'one step forward, two steps back' updates have severely tried my patience with Swype during the past two years. And it still takes up at least 12MB of internal memory, and cannot be moved to the SD card. But overall, the app that I first tried in early 2010 is now even better. What's more, its performance actually improves with use, as it learns from experience how to interpret your gestures and predict your words correctly according to context. As I said above, using Swype I can now write nearly as fast on my phone as I can type on my PC's physical keyboard. That's worth a big chunk of memory and quite a lot of 'early adopter' grief.

Swype offers two secondary keyboards for lesser-used characters, one of which is shown in the left-hand screenshot below. Secondary and accented characters can also be entered or selected by long-pressing or press-holding keys on the main keyboard. In addition, there is a numeric keyboard and an Edit menu (below right). Simple edit functions (Cut, Copy, Paste, Select all) can be performed directly from the main keyboard using simple gestures.

One of Swype's secondary keyboards (left). On the right, the Edit mode.

There's more! Starting from a core package of US English and Spanish, Swype offers a wide selection of downloadable language modules. I have installed UK English and French, and can cycle between these by tapping the language key (circled in red in the screenshot above).

Swype was recently bought by Nuance Communications, whose Dragon Dictation speech recognition software is now built into the app, providing voice-to-text as an alternative method for text input. Voice input is initiated using a special key, circled in green in the screenshot above. I am not sure that I will ever make regular use of this feature, but I have tested it and can report that for me it works significantly better than the standard Google Voice Actions input software that comes as a standard part of Android 2.2. (I have not installed the updated Google Search, which includes an improved version of Voice Actions.) Like Google Voice Actions, Dragon Dictation uses a dedicated central server and therefore requires an open internet connection - no connection, no voice recognition. I have not been able to find any help for Dragon Dictation on the Swype website or forum, but I have tracked down a User Guide for Dragon Naturally Speaking 11 on Nuance's site. This does not seem to be adapted for the version of Dragon in Swype, but gives a good indication of how voice input is supposed to work. (I have asked Swype customer service for documentation, and will pass this on when I hear from them.) In the meantime, I've found that 'Comma', 'Full stop', 'Dash', and 'New line' are correctly interpreted as punctuation and formatting commands.

Of course, Swype is not the only alternative Android keyboard app. I have also heard good things about SwiftKey (€2.99) and SlideIT (€4.50), but have not tried either of them. I'd love to hear how you get text into your phone. What have you tried? What have you hated? And what have you stuck with?

Meanwhile, Swype is still in beta, and you can still register as a beta user for free. Sign up here!

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