Microsoft SwiftKey Android Support Forums

I'm a diehard SwiftKey user and I frequently type in Japanese. I hate Romaji keyboards and I'm forced to use Google Japanese Input, the problem with that is their keyboard is small, especially the qwerty keyboard, which I use for quickly typing English when I'm mostly using Japanese, and typing in English on Google Japanese Input is painful, it can only predict words as you start to type them, correctly, it can't fix your typos... I miss keys a lot, SwiftKey is a life saver. Why in the world is there no flick input for Japanese? It already has the dictionary and kanji from the romaji keyboard, I've seen rumors dated around 2014 about a flick keyboard scouring the internet. What do I have to do to get a good keyboard?

Recently I noticed that the question mark in arabic keyboard was rotated.
This one is english ? Open to left
This one is arabic ? This should have the open from the right
The arabic one should be rotated

I used to use touchpal keyboard and that's why I am missing two features in SwiftKey keyboard that is number one in touchpal keyboard when you swipe left the erasing button it erases the whole word and secondly it shows more than 3 predicted words on the keyboard that's called "more than 3 candidates" option in touchpal keyboard

When I type in Chinese and Japanese, SwiftKey does not really learn the slang words that I typed. It's a bit frustrating 

I saw someone else half address this, but whenever I try to add a semicolon after using flow input I get a space been the last word and the punctuation. If I want to use a semicolon or make my own made-up-phrase, I either have to backspace the last letter of what I've swiped (flowed) so it knows to look at what comes next as individual characters, or use the arrow keys to back up after hitting that semicolon and backspace spaces. Same applies to hyphenated words or series of words, but there's no reason to have the semicolon/colon/hyphen or dash not but the end of the preceding word. Particularly with the semicolon. I tend to like my punctuation as a way to fragment what would be a run on sentence and other areas where it would be appropriate but SwiftKey wants there to be space on either side of the ";" character or when using hyphenations. It should always hug the word to the left like a comma would; this range is same idea applies to full-on commas as well: it wants to have a space on either side instead of jumping back to the end of the last word like typing a period would. Why not give some (slightly) more obscure punctuation and symbols the period and comma treatment where after flowing a word it auto-spaces, but if a period, comma, or second space is input next that keyboard will smartly insert the formatting and punctuation before the auto-space between words.

Another hiccup I have that's always a fight is, for example, I want to list a file extension, SwiftKey will fight me to the pain several times in a row to not have it try to reformat that section to a URL.

It's to the point that I will flow a word, [backspace], [backspace], retype last letter of word and then long-pressing the "n" key for my semicolon to be in the proper place.

Side note:if the keyboard has to autocorrect the second half of a hyphenated word or expression it will add a space between the hyphen and the word it fixed looking like "blahblib- blahblah", assuming it had to fix my 'blahblah' for me, when the goal was "blahblib-blahblah".

SwiftKey is still hands down the most robust, well-rounded keyboard and I want you guys to continue to dig in your heels, keep pushing the envelope, and retain that innovation and magic autocorrect advantage without it getting too bogged down and keep it first time user friendly!

Keep up the stellar work guys!
-Ty

Also if you wanted to add gravy it'd be nice to have a way to flow on a larger screen (5.5" on my Pixel XL) when I'm manipulating the phone entirely with one hand without totally scrunching up the keyboard with the one-handed layout.

Is it possible to add a feature where the keyboard animates while closing (E.g. Sliding Down) and opening (E.g. Sliding Up)? Thanks for reading!

Hi. I'm giving SwiftKey a very thorough beta test, and want to provide my feedback.

Literally one thing is driving me nuts, and that is the inability to map the character we desire into each key's long-presses. I see people all over complaining non-stop about where keys are positioned, and yet SwiftKey promotes itself as highly customizable with a target audience of those who are transitioning from default OS keyboard configurations, and have often trained themselves to use those configurations. I don't know about you, but I'm a tech guru and it takes "many months" of continuous work to remap my brain on the position of where the special characters are located.

I believe there should be, first of all, Presets on what Samsung keyboard, Android keyboard, and all the other default OS keyboards have mapped for long-presses. SwiftKey can choose to keep their configuration in their preset and even make that the default configuration, but I'm here to say that the absence of this feature is one of the largest reasons people do not want to transition to SwiftKey.

Second, there needs to be the ability to map long-presses to whatever characters we desire. More prudently, the ability to map even the MAIN keys to what we desire. Imagine no more disgruntled hate speeches on why "this or that is not positioned there"

Everyone cannot agree on the same configuration. Please consider this in your future updates.

Cordially yours,

Matt Winans

Hi I'm just wondering if there's a way to make the flow line a bit smaller when typing with the flow.

In older an older version of swiftkey I was able to change capitalization of the last word. Now pressing shift changes the capitalization of the next word. Since swiftkey is not very good in predicting capital letters in German I always have to manually select the last words again and then change it afterwards.

Is it possible to change that behavior?

I've run into a particularly annoying bug.

Let's say I have already:

One two three

And I select (highlight) three:

One two three

And then, with "three" still selected, I swipe the word "seven":

One two seven

The word is now correct but the word in the middle of the prediction panel is still "three". If I press space or type any other character it miscorrects "seven" back to "three":

One two three

This is particularly noticeable in Chrome. When I tap the URL bar while already on a page, whatever the current URL is will be pre-selected for me. So let's say I want to search for "happy cats". If I swipe "happy", I get "happy" but the middle suggestion is "I". So if I swipe or type "cats" next, it becomes: "I cats". In the past week I have run into this SO many times as it hijacks my attempts to Google in Chrome.

Hi

I've been using SwiftKey for years now, and it has become more and more painful, to the point that I'm a meme to my friends now due to the way I type if I don't read twice before sending.

First, it looks like SwiftKey went from correcting my typos to considering that my typos are the way words are supposed to be written. So it corrects the right words into wrong.

Second, the French corrector is pretty broken to begin with, there are even tenses it don't know. So I have to manually rewrite verbs, even if I had them right the first time, because SwiftKey mess with it.

Last of all, since I switched to a new A5 2016 recently, the keyboard sometimes erases one to two words while I'm typing, for no reason.

I also have the "SwiftKey closing while I'm typing" problem I saw elsewhere, happens on Textra and Facebook Messenger.

I use the last beta of the app, with swift off because it made the keyboard even more laggy and unpredictable.

I wanted to change app, but yours is the best in terms of customization and key placement.

As you could have guessed I'm French. Strangely enough (?) I had absolutely no issue typing this message. Is French the problem? Or the way your app learnt me? Both?

Cheers.

Just recently my enter changed from being able to add a new line to sending the message. I really wish I could switch this back. If it's in the settings, I CANNOT find it.

I use this keyboard all the time. Continually ask for personal URL address. Can I make a website address true my SwiftKey account. To be used across the internet and various websites apps and just for personal use. If not where and how do I set up he personal show me website or personal URL address did I can use every month.

I have been following the SwiftKey support steps here to enable cloud clipboard syncing between my Windows 11 laptop and Android phone (Samsung Galaxy Note 8).

I've ensured that the cloud clipboard and sync settings are enabled on both my phone and PC, but whenever I copy a URL on either device, it doesn't show up in the clipboard history on the other device.

Am I missing something or looking in the wrong place? Please let me know, any help is appreciated! Thank you for your time!

For example, "Ha e" is still being suggested (a mistype of "have"), after three times deleting my personal dictionary.  I want these non-words removed!  They should have never been learned in the first place.

. bj. fe. w5u. eyg. rub. ruug. eeu. otr. xyrth. lhfuu

i would use the space bar when i need to, please microsoft

First, I will clarify some things for those who may not know and for those who might assume that I am confusing spell-checker with keyboard input prediction.

Then I will:

Bring back a problem that has been called for attention many times and explain why it happens;

Explain why I think it matters and why previous suggested workarounds are sub-optimal;

Discuss Google’s (Gboard) chosen workaround;

Give my suggestion to fix the problem.

Definitions

Input prediction (IP) (Auto-complete and auto-correction) is a feature whose main purpose in software keyboards is to allow the user to type faster. The keyboard suggests words before you type them entirely and correct words where there are typos. By auto-correcting, the keyboard allows the user to type without painstaking care and precision, which allows for faster typing.

Spell-checking (SC) is (usually) a feature of word processors or system-wide input fields (MS Word, Android, and Google Chrome for desktop, each has its own spell-checker independent from software keyboards or any input method). Its main purpose is to alert and correct the user about the orthography of a given language.

The problem

People who use simultaneous multi-language input prediction – a feature present on SwiftKey (and Gboard also) – start seeing a red underling in all words of one of the languages.

The reason is that, while SwiftKey’s input prediction does have support for multiple languages simultaneously, the android’s system-wide spell-checker active in the user’s phone (usually AOSP’s or Google’s spell-checker) does not have.

Previous suggestions

Here it has been suggested that the user should disable the spell checker:

https://support.swiftkey.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115002878149-Red-underline-Not-a-SK-problem-

Notably, this is also the approach used by Gboard (more on that latter), but I think this is far from the ideal because it forces the user to resort to input prediction (IP) as a form of spell-checking (SC). This is a problem because, as I said in the beginning, input-prediction is a feature focused on fast typing (as it should be) and not on orthography. To illustrate, imagine how a user uses IP as SC:

The user types the word and hopes that the keyboard will correct it automatically if it’s wrong. Except that, even when typing correctly, sometimes the first prediction (the middle one in SwiftKey) is not the desired one. And other times the prediction dictionary doesn’t have the desired word. For those reasons, the exact typed word is always shown as an option, typos and all (as it should be), and the keyboard memorizes anything the user decides to input (as it should be) either by typing space and accepting the middle prediction, or by selecting the desired word in the list.

The result is that the IP learns a lot of slangs, acronyms and jargon (as is should be), but also learns misspelled words. And the user has no way of knowing if the thing he/her has typed didn’t appear as the first (middle) prediction because it was wrong or because the neural network crystal ball simply got it wrong or because the word doesn’t exist in the IP dictionary. Also, sometimes the misspelling is so different from the intended word that the latter doesn’t appear in the prediction list, and sometimes the misspelling is even presented as the first (middle) prediction.

The clear solution to that in my opinion is to have a separate mechanism for checking orthography, the spell-checker, which has to support simultaneously multi-language input as well (chrome desktop browser has that). This is a second independent layer that runs after input prediction, and is not affected by the IP dictionary. And when the user decides to tap a word and include it in the SC dictionary it is a conscious deliberate decision.

How does Gboard deal with that

https://support.swiftkey.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115002630445-Changing-the-language-doesn-t-change-the-system-spell-checker

Here it has been said that SwiftKey cannot control the spellchecker, and that Gboard doesn’t break in the same way because it has “advanced system privileges that SwiftKey cannot access”. I’m not an android programmer, but from the tests I have done, it seems to me that Gboard has the exact same level of system access that SwiftKey has with respect to spell-checking:

If my selected system-wide spell-checker is the AOSP one, it behaves in the exact same way with Gboard as it does with SwiftKey. The thing that Gboard does different is that, along with the keyboard, the app installs a spell-checking service as well. I’m using LineageOS, which doesn’t come with Gboard or Google’s spell-checker, only the AOSP ones. And when I install Gboard, Google’s SC appears as an option.

Now, Google’s solution is far from the best in my opinion. For what I tested, the ‘Google spell-checker’ (installed by Gboard) simply disables itself if it detects that Gboard is being used and uses only the system’s language when it detects other 3rd party keyboards (exactly like the AOSP one). And I already explained my problems with both solutions.

My suggestion

Simply put together a simple spell-checker with simultaneous multi-language support and ship it within the SwiftKey app. I think this would be simple to do, just copy the default dictionaries of the SwiftKey IP as a starting point, but it would not have to deal with predictions and other complex features that a software keyboard has to deal with. Again, copy the dictionaries, any word learned by the IP should not be automatically learned by the SC.

The simplest implementation would be to have one hash table for each language. If the user decides to use two languages simultaneously, a new empty language-agnostic hash table is created. That way, when the user includes a new word to de dictionary, it is included in the language-agnostic one to avoid guessing the language of the word. Then, spell-checking a word is simply to query the word on 3 hash tables.

Why am I suggesting this to you?

https://support.swiftkey.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360038666231-How-to-Active-Spell-Checker-in-SwiftKey

Here it has been said that SC “was never a feature of SwiftKey itself”, and that it’s an Android problem.

Indeed, if only AOSP’s SC did support multiple languages simultaneously, this problem would be solved. But I use and prefer SwiftKey; AOSP’s keyboard still doesn’t have support for simultaneous multi-language input, suggesting that this support is also not in the horizon for AOSP spell-checker; and it’s more probable that Google’s engineers will fix this only in Google’s SC, in a way that works exclusively with Gboard (as it’s the case with the ‘auto-disable SC’ workaround).

And ultimately this is a problem that (to me at least) seems extremely simple to solve and is hurting your product.

Here are some treads complaining of SC-related problems that, while not necessarily being all related to multi-language support, could benefit from a simple Spell Checker shipped inside the SwiftKey app.

https://support.swiftkey.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115002905745-Multilingual-keyboard-underlines-all-English-as-incorrect-Spell-Checker-

https://support.swiftkey.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360057381832-Red-underline

https://support.swiftkey.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360041911952-Swiftkey-red-underline-is-gone-

https://support.swiftkey.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360054924171-Red-line-under-text

https://support.swiftkey.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115004508429--Duplicate-Android-Showing-red-underlines-for-all-words-in-second-language

https://support.swiftkey.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360071921211-Swiftkey-underline-not-showing

https://support.swiftkey.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115000617369-Reduced-English-suggestions-for-incorrect-spellings

https://support.swiftkey.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360043539472-Red-line-under-spelling-errors-with-SwiftKey-

https://support.swiftkey.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115000528649-Spell-Check-with-SwiftKey-has-Red-underlined-text

P.S.:

I’m conscious that I might be wrong about a number of things: There could be another workaround that solves the problem in a satisfactory way; There could be a barrier to install system-wide spell-checkers on android; Maybe spell-checking is harder than I think, even without grammar-checking or prediction; etc.

In that case it would be nice if someone could explain the situation in a more in-depth way.

When in portrait mod , SwiftKey functions properly, but in landscape mode it overlays the input dialog with a blinding white input box that fills the entire top of the screen. It occurs with authentication dialogs, when entering an app review in Google Play store, etc. This is quite a shock to the eyes when working in dark mode.

The problem doesn't occur with Samsung keyboard. 

Devices :

• Samsung Galaxy S8+, Android 8
• Samsung Galaxy Tab S5e, Android 9

On my Swiftkey main keyboard, I can see the special characters above the main keys. My friend just installed Swiftkey, and the special characters don't show up. If you hold down the main key, the special characters show, but who can remember where each special character is hiding? I have checked all settings, and don't find anything about turning special characters on and off. Help please!

Anything that uses a full-stop is beyond annoying to input. I end up having to un-capitalize and remove spaces.  I can't be the only one. examples:

"e.g." becomes "E. g. "

"www." becomes "Www. "

etc.

Is there some way around this?