SwiftKey Launches Symbols App for People With Talking and Learning Difficulties

SwiftKey on Wednesday launched a new app dubbed SwiftKey Symbols,"a symbol-based assistive communication app, running on Android, targeted at (but not limited to) young, non-verbal individuals with special needs". The app is currently under beta in SwiftKey Greenhouse , the company's page from where users can test apps and provide feedback before their stable versions are launched.

"We wanted to bring an accessible, free app to people with talking and learning difficulties so that they could communicate more easily with their friends and family," said the company on its blog post.

Users can construct a sentence in SwiftKey Symbols by choosing images, from a set of categories or the prediction bar powered by the SwiftKey SDK. As per the company, the app learns from each individual's behaviour to show relevant images. The app can also monitors what symbols have been used at what time of the day and day of the week. This will result in giving more relevant predictions in future.

SwiftKey Symbols is also customisable as users can add their own images and categories, and use audio playback a speech-to-text feature to read sentences. The app is available from the SwiftKey website.

SwiftKey earlier this week updated its app with new features including a revamped emoji panel. The updated panel adds double-word prediction and offers two free new festive holiday themes for all users. It can remember the last used category for user convenience. The update also adds support for Pinyin, a phonetic system for transcribing the Mandarin pronunciations of Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet used in China, Taiwan, and Singapore.