This is really about disambiguation - based on the keys that have been tapped, what words could be intended? They tend to use lists or dictionaries of words and are most famously what people refer to when they say “predictive text”. Predictions can be simple, such as in older keyboards with Nuance’s T9. This is pretty much where the comparisons end. The single thing that unites these products is the fact that they attempt to predict words. So what are those keyboards doing differently? We sat down with Joe Braidwood, chief marketing officer for SwiftKey, our favourite Android keyboard (and one of our favourites on iOS), to talk about how those web-enabled keyboards do things differently. Even so, there are clear differences between the predictions that your phone’s default keyboard makes and the ones you get from a keyboard like SwiftKey, Fleksy or Swype. How Predictive Keyboards DifferĪlmost every modern predictive keyboard uses the type of technology we mentioned earlier. Depending on the keyboard you use, it may share a system-wide dictionary that leverages everything you type to build its scores, or it may split up dictionaries by app, so you’re not using commonly texted phrases when you type an email and vice versa. The graphic above, which outlines how Apple’s predictive keyboard processes words, comes from the latter. You can read more about the way predictive keyboards work in detail in this thread at Stack Exchange, which references the specific text in Apple’s two patents (US Patent No. If you ignore it a third or fourth time (how many times depends on the specific keyboard), your keyboard will mark it as a future probable choice, and start presenting you with it when you type similar words or sentences. The first or second time you ignore the word, it will assume it’s not a misspelling, but not a word you use often enough to be presented with in similar usage patterns. Things get interesting if you ignore the word - good predictive keyboards even use your lack of action to learn from your typing habits. If you add it to your dictionary, the keyboard “learns” the word immediately, and it will offer it up the next time you enter a spelling pattern that’s close to those keys or use similar words before and after the phrase but misspell “lifehacker”.
If you accept a correction, obviously the keyboard will continue to assume the word is wrong and offer corrections in the future. You have three options: you can accept one of the corrections, you can ignore the word and leave it as is, or you can add it to your personal dictionary so it won’t bother you when you type it again.
For example, if you type in “lifehacker” and your keyboard has never seen you use it before, it will offer to correct it to another phrase that it thinks is more likely (no, I don’t mean “lifejacket”). It then “scores” those words by the probability you’ll use or need it again. In its most basic form, keyboard prediction uses text that you enter over time to build a custom, local “dictionary” of words and phrases that you’ve typed repeatedly.