Type Faster: 6 Tips and Tricks for Mastering Android’s Keyboard-gctid84291

[Ajamu]

Type Faster: 6 Tips and Tricks for Mastering Android's Keyboard



 If all you do with your Android phone or tablet's keyboard is tap out  words, you are missing a lot of great features. There's more to learn  about a keyboard than you might expect.

 Of course, you can just type out words without paying attention to  any of these features — but mastering them will help you type faster and  save time while entering text.

 Voice Typing

 If your hands aren't free — or you just feel like dictating — you can  tap the microphone button on the keyboard and enter words just by  speaking them.

 This feature sends your voice input to Google's speech recognition  service, where it's examined, converted to text, and sent back to your  phone. This means that it requires an Internet connection, but the  approach of using Google's massive computing power makes it surprisingly  accurate.

 To enter punctuation marks while using voice recognition, just say  "period," "comma," "question mark," "exclamation mark," or "exclamation  point." Android will enter the appropriate punctuation mark instead of  the words.


 

Offline Voice Typing

 If you're using Android 4.2 or a newer version of Android, you can  now use voice typing offline. You'll just need to install the  appropriate voice-recognition language dictionaries. Note that voice  recognition is slightly less accurate in offline mode.

 To install the dictionaries, open the Settings screen, tap Language  & input, and tap the settings button to the right of Google voice  typing.



Download the languages you want to use offline from the Offline Speech Recognition screen.


 

Swipe to Type

 The default keyboard in Android 4.2 gained the ability to type words simply by swiping your finger over them.

 To type a word by swiping, simply touch the first letter and glide  your finger over the letters — for example, to type Geek, touch the G,  move your finger to the E, and then move your finger to the K. Android  will try to guess what you're typing, displaying it above the keyboard.  Lift your finger and the word will be typed. You can do this to type  many words in sequence quickly, lifting your finger from the screen in  between each one.


 

Word Prediction and Auto-correction

 When tapping in a word, Android 4.2′s keyboard will try to think  ahead and guess the word you're about to type. For example, type Messa  and  "Message" will appear above the keyboard. You can then tap the  space bar to move to the next word and Android will automatically fill  in the rest of the word it's expecting you to type.



The keyboard will even use context to guess which word you're likely  to type, even if you haven't started typing a word yet. Tap one of the  suggestions to type it.


 

Keyboard Settings

 You can customize your keyboard's behavior, too. Open the Settings  screen, tap Language & input, and tap the settings button to the  right of the Android keyboard.



The keyboard settings screen contains options for disabling features  like swiping, auto-correction, auto-capitalization, and next-word  suggestions. You can also make auto-correction even more aggressive or  switch to other keyboard layouts, like the French QWERTZ layout.


 

Third-Party Keyboard Replacements

 Android's included keyboard is just one of many options — in fact,  your phone's manufacturer may have already included third-party  keyboards like Swype for you to use. You can install other third-party  keyboards from Google Play and switch between them. For example, many  people consider SwiftKey to have the best auto-correction features,  while Swype is the original swipe-over-letters-to-type-them keyboard.

Such experimental features are usually found on Android first — you  can find a wide variety of different keyboards, all with their own ideas  of how to make text input faster and more efficient.


 

 Android's keyboard isn't just a keyboard — it's a piece of software  with its own unique tricks, but also one that can be swapped out and  replaced for another keyboard that you might like better. If you want a  different keyboard on your iPhone or iPad, you'll have to jailbreak it.