Popular keyboard app SwiftKey has released an updated version of its Android app to add support for 12 new Indic languages. With this, SwiftKey now supports around 15 Indian languages. SwiftKey had released the app in open beta last month, with support for Indian languages like Assamese, Gujarati, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Oriya, Telugu, Urdu, Tamil, Nepali and Sinhala. Currently, Urdu and Hindi are still not fully featured with no ‘smart spacing’ option, a feature that automatically adds spaces as you type. The company had previously added support for Hindi and Hinglish in December 2012. It had also released an iOS app recently, although its not clear as to when the company plans to roll out support for Indian languages on this platform. Besides the new languages, the updated app claims to reduce the time it takes for the keyboard to appear and also the keyboard quit time. It also claims to offer more responsive typing and faster switching between fields. Competition: In April this year, a new Indic Keyboard was released by the software collective Swathanthra Malayalam Computing allowing users to type in 15 Indian languages on Android. This app was developed as part of the ongoing Government of India-supported Android R&D project of ICFOSS (International Centre For Free and Open Source Software), an independent organisation set up by the Kerala government to popularize open source software. KeyPoint Technologies also offers an alternative text input application called ‘Adaptxt‘ which was released back in November 2012 and supports 13 Indian languages. The company had later inked a…
