'Can you capture the way people express themselves and help them to put their thoughts out of their head and onto their phone? That's what's really different about SwiftKey, and it's why people have got behind it in the way that they have.' 'When we started looking at the problem of text input on smartphones, we saw it not as a problem about keyboards, but as a problem about language,' says co-founder and chief techology officer Ben Medlock.

The company has a third iteration, SwiftKey 3, in public beta release, and a fervent community of 50,000 Android users providing feedback and suggestions for future features. SwiftKey now supports around 45 languages, having released the original SwiftKey software in 2010, then the SwiftKey X update in 2011.

'There's 20-25 out there, but they tend to be using the default Android prediction, and just changing the colour or doing various themes.' 'What we focused on is next-word contextual prediction, and that's what differentiates us from the other keyboards that you see out on Android,' says chief executive Jon Reynolds.

Swift key android