![]() For example, take the phrase “how are you?” When you type “how” into Swiftkey, it automatically offers “are” as the next word (before you type a thing). It uses an algorithm built by analysing huge amounts of text to predict what you are trying to type, and what you want to type next. ![]() SwiftKey’s eponymous keyboard app supercharges the traditional keyboard. ![]() Even as the cold steel of the typewriter was replaced by the cool glass of a touchscreen smartphone, Qwerty has continued to dominate.Ī number of companies are rethinking the keyboard for the digital age, led by a small UK startup called SwiftKey, so that a mere 150 years after it was first created, the keyboard could finally be made to behave just how the user wants it to. And yet this odd layout became the standard, used since on billions of devices from typewriters to tablets and PCs. And as such you’d expect it to be swept away as the technology changed. Even the way the keys are arranged in staggered columns is an echo of the mechanical underpinnings of the early typewriters. By the late 1870s, the pattern of keys that we still use today was more-or-less settled. The metal arms – the typebars – on which the letters were mounted could jam if adjacent letters were hit in quick succession, which meant the letters that were most often used together in words had to be kept separate.Īnd so the arrangement of letters now known as Qwerty emerged. The first version of the keyboard, conjured by its inventor Christopher Latham Sholes in the late 1860s, had two simple rows of keys in alphabetical order.īut his original design exposed a problem lurking in the mechanism of these early typewriters. The seemingly-random arrangement of the letters on the keyboard had little to do with the needs of the typist. ![]() It took app economy darling SwiftKey to innovate it in a powerful new direction. The keyboard is a living fossil and the alignment of its keys hints at the strange history of its origins. How SwiftKey built the world’s smartest keyboard and soared to the top of the app economy ![]()
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