Have you ever wished that your smartphone keyboard was smarter and easier to type on? Well Jon Reynolds did and he made his own unique solution, SwiftKey, a replacement for the stock keyboard on Android phones and recently even iPhones. SwiftKey analyzes your writing style and can predict what you are going to say next before you can even type it. The keyboard also lets you slide your fingers between letters so you don’t even have to lift your finger up. As stated online, SwiftKey accurately predicts what you are going to say next a third of the time, and 80% of the time, users do not have to type in more than 2 letters before SwiftKey correctly guesses the word.
SwiftKey was created in 2008 when Reynolds witnessed a friend struggle to use his blackberry keyboard. Reynolds saw that mobile phones were the next big thing and that innovating the keyboard was an untapped market. SwiftKey was the bestselling app on google play for two years straight and is now estimated to be installed on more than 200 million devices. This past year Apple announced that soon iPhones would be able to get replacement keyboards, opening a huge market for SwiftKey. Jon Reynolds is a great entrepreneur because he found a way to solve a major problem that no one had found a perfect solution for yet. Reynolds has truly innovated the smartphone keyboard market.
Great post, Nick! I know so many times that an app like this has come in handy for me. Whenever I used to have the Android, I would always download an alternate keyboard because I found it a lot easier and more efficient, and I like anything that generally makes my life a lot less difficult. 🙂 Awesome post!
This is a great idea and Reynolds deserves a lot of credit for coming up with it at such an early stage in the smartphone game. Being able to guess the right word within 2 keystrokes 80% of the time is pretty impressive. I wonder how long it took him to develop the technology?
Great post! As a swift key user myself I am very impressed with this product and uncanny accuracy. I think what we can take away from a story like this is that we need to see things before everyone else does. As an entrepreneur being able to predict what the next big thing will be is a huge advantage.
I love how he improved such a small thing that we all take for granted often, but his design was enough of an improvement that the equivalent of over half of America uses it. It’s awesome to see a minor innovation take off like that.
I am interested to try this out for myself because my iPhone’s autocorrect and I do not get along very well. But I am intrigued by the swiping across letters opposed to having to tap them.