Honestly, I find that it works astonishingly poorly. Autocorrect is often wrong, sometimes showing the right thing milliseconds before second-guessing itself into a totally wrong word, so now I'm having to backspace because for some reason typing the actual letters I want is bad user interface.
I turned off autocorrect years ago and never looked back. Sometimes I misspell a word but it’s better than typing a word slightly wrong and having a completely different word pop out. I’ll still use autocomplete sometimes to save some typing.
Then it was killed, and Android shipped its default keyboard ("gboard") with one that included swiping. I've used it ever since, not thinking about it, but it has never been as good as Swype, and about 20% of my words are errors. I don't think about it much because their autocorrect suggestions are pretty good when you tap on a word, but it really is annoying. Honestly, it's insane that I keep swiping because it would be faster just to type than to swipe and correct every fifth word.
I have now downloaded Swiftkey. We'll see if it's any better. My first gripe is that the backspace key doesn't delete a whole word, which, when you're swiping, seems natural to me (either the whole word is right or it's not), but I'm sure there are settings and improvements I can make as I get used to it.
(Edit: The translate as you type feature is a perhaps-niche but killer feature for me. I often have to write to people in my poor Spanish, and always had to go back and forth between the Translate app and the app I was writing it. Doing it as I type is amazing.)
The one thing that made Swype awesome compared to GBoard is the configurability. On GBoard, it appears to be impossible to turn off auto space insertion after a predicted swipe whereas on Swype, one could turn that off: this allowed swiping away at long urls a word at a time.
Ayer having tried Swiftkey for a few hours, I've reverted back to gboard. I don't know if my old keyboard knows me more or I know it, but Swiftkey just could not get words right, even when I could clearly see the trail hitting the letters.
Maybe its prediction was turned up too high, and yet not correctly? When I finally gave up I had been trying to write The Warmth of Other Suns, and it could not get "Suns," no matter how slowly and accurately I did it, presumably because "subs" or "sins" are much more common words. (Actually gboard has trouble with Suns right now too, but not as bad.)
I'm waiting for one of these to come installed with GPT-3. Presumably a GPT-3 model could look at a sentence and work out which sword doesn't fit...
Yeah, I'm not using swype. Just SwiftKey but I find it gets it wrong most of the time. It occasionally picks up typos and I'm actually writing this comment without manually correcting any errors. To try and gauge how well it does. And I don't type well. It seems. To be decent enough. Almost anyway.
I've been getting increasingly annoyed with SwiftKey lately. It's so fucking dumb, is unbelievable. I'll be typing a sentence with a really common phrase in it and it will substitute some absolutely ridiculous word I've never used in my life for the everyday one I wanted to type.
Inspired by this thread, I just went looking for an alternative and found Yandex.Keyboard. I've been using their browser on Android for a long time but had no idea they did a keyboard too. First impressions are pretty good. In typing this comment, I've had to correct 2 words so far. With SwiftKey, I'd have had that many corrections to do in each sentence!
YMMV --as I said, I've only been using it for under an hour
Apple swipe is f'n horrible. I've disabled every autocorrect I can and it still goes back and will change previous words to the word I've typed when it decides I don't know what the hell I'm typing.
I have a hybrid experience where I really need swipe to get things done fast, but I always disable autocorrect, because when I actually type I don't like to be corrected. This way I can put the anger on me rather than the software.
I'm the same way. Nothing makes me want to throw a device through the wall like it autocorrecting me in a way I don't want. this is actually a reason I still use android phones even though I agree iphone probably has better security
Agreed regarding target audience, though.