This article was 1st published on our sister Site, Digital World Native.
The ‘Word Flow’ keyboard was introduced by Microsoft earlier this year to take on Apple’s own keyboard offering for the iPhone & iPad as well as the recently released Google Gboard.
The keyboard’s new release, v2.1, tries to predict what you want to write by leaning from what you type & what you erase out, now even letting you type swear words, which it wouldn’t do in previous versions.
The keyboard lets you easily search for things like contacts, weather forecasts, news, videos, facts, emojis, GIFs & restaurants, & is integrated with Bing, Microsoft’s Web-based search engine. Its prediction features will intelligently suggest the next word in a sentence, & will get the predictions better over time while learning based on how you type. It’ll even predict the names of your contacts as you type.
The keyboard’s customizable, so you can change the theme & background image using one of the many images included in the app or you can use your own. You can type using gestures & 1-handed by switching to Arc mode, so you can comfortably reach keys on larger screens while getting a satisfactory typing experience.
If you search & find something that you’d like to send, just tap it, & the result will get added to your history so that you’ll easily find it again. You can remove or refresh these results when you no longer need them.
The keyboard is available only for iOS devices, with limited functionality on iPads. It’s also only available in English & from the US App Store only. It’s a product of Microsoft’s experimental Garage Lab team & was developed with help from Microsoft Research & Bing. It requires iOS v9.0 or later.
The app can be downloaded from the Apple App store (US only for now) here.
Image Credit: Microsoft
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