New android keyboards to auto-complete your words

Washington -  Two android developers have been working on a latest app that can scan your social-media, text-messaging and Gmail output to get a better sense of how you write.

SwiftKey 3, a 3.99 dollar release in tablet and phone versions goes farther down that road. If you grant it permission, it will scan your Facebook and Twitter identities, read your Gmail, subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed and look over your outgoing text messages to learn your style.

This personalization has allowed SwiftKey to auto-complete words way too esoteric for the standard Android keyboard, Discovery News reported.

However, its habit of automatically adding a space after a comma saves too little effort for the confusion it causes, and typing abbreviations with periods like “L.A.” is borderline impossible unless you add in that punctuation later on.

The other app Swype has already won fans for this clever shortcut – you trace a path over the letters you want to type, allowing for exceedingly fast input of even long words.

But that approach breaks down if Swype’s dictionary lacks the word you desired.

The current beta aims to fix that with Swype Connect. With permission, it scans the names of your Facebook friends, your Twitter updates and the handles of people you follow there, your Gmail and your outgoing texts.

It won’t learn as much about you as Swype SwiftKey, but it also requires less faith in its Seattle-based developers.

Unfortunately, it has its own auto-correct annoyances - automatically inserting a space after a Twitter username means you can’t append a comma or an apostrophe without moving the cursor back by hand.

Since Swype only sells its software to phone vendors, the general public is limited to downloading a beta version that will expire in about six months.

This perpetual-beta approach can inflict mistakes that shouldn’t make it to “finished” software like an earlier beta flipped from English to Spanish with one tap.

Both of these apps demand regular re-training, or the snapshots they took of your Twitter or Facebook activity will grow stale. And since Google’s browser software seems to handle text slightly different from other apps, you lose some of their auto-correction there.