ShakeSpeak was announced by SwiftKey today. The keyboard can be downloaded by visiting its page on the SwiftKey Greenhouse, a place where new ideas being trialled by the company are seeded.
The “KeyBard” replaces SwiftKey’s predictive text suggestions with phrases and vocabulary used by Shakespeare. It lets you type like the 16th century playwright by suggesting words used by Shakespeare in his work.
SwiftKey’s language experts have analysed Shakespeare’s complete works to ensure ShakeSpeak is familiar with his Elizabethan vocabulary. The app can suggest lines from plays ranging from Macbeth to The Tempest, letting you send passages of Shakespeare more quickly directly from your keyboard.
As with SwiftKey’s regular keyboards, ShakeSpeak learns from you as you type, gradually becoming accustomed to your language and idiolect as you use it more. The keyboard will recognize which play you are quoting from and suggest popular phrases to include in your typing.
The language analysis revealed some of Shakespeare’s most popular words and terms. Of the bard’s top 10 full sentences, five are exclamations, ‘Ha!’, ‘What!’, ‘How now!’, ‘Away!’ and ‘Hark!’ SwiftKey advises starting your sentences with ‘Ha’, ‘O!’ or ‘What ho!’ for “an authentic Shakespearean feel.”
“2016 marks a yearlong celebration of Shakespeare and the incredible literary legacy he has left us,” said SwiftKey’s Head of Languages, Caroline Gasparin. “SwiftKey’s technology learns your personal writing style to predict what you will most likely type next. We have trawled thousands of words from his plays for SwiftKey to learn from the great playwright himself and build this personalized language model. To celebrate the 400th anniversary of his death, the ShakeSpeak keyboard makes the greatest playwright of all time accessible in a new and unique way.”
SwiftKey has started a Twitter campaign to get people using ShakeSpeak and writing their own Elizabethan-style passages. You can join in by “scribing a swift sonnet” in the app and sharing it online with the hashtag #ShakeSpeak.
SwiftKey is one of the most popular third-party keyboard apps for Android and iOS. The company was recently bought by Microsoft in a deal thought to be worth $250 million. At the time of the announcement in February, SwiftKey said its predictive text technology has saved users 100,000 years of typing time, the equivalent of 10 trillion keystrokes.
