Fleksy, the new mobile keyboard that debuted on iOS back in August, was showing its stuff at CES this year. The trick of automatically predicting what you’re typing without requiring much more than your relative tap position and word length is no less impressive than it has been in the past, but Fleksy now has a new trick up its sleeve, too: an Android version that can actually replace your stock keyboard, something that isn’t possible on iOS.
Fleksy also adds a space bar to its default, extremely sparse UI as part of making the move to Android, which can be optionally hidden if the user so chooses. Likewise, you can actually make it so that the entire keyboard chrome itself disappears and you can type using the trademark Fleksy no-look method. The Android version is still in limited beta, however, so you’ll have to sign up and wait to get let in by the Fleksy development team.
The tech takes a little getting used to, but only because it’s so intuitive I found myself typing nonsense to see what it would come up with instead of just trying to make actual words. It’s also almost like you can’t quite bring yourself to trust Fleksy to get things right, which makes you slow down, but after a little while it’s clear this is much better than your standard input methods and predictive text engines.
On iOS, Fleksy is really little more than a tech demo, since it can’t be used to replace the default keyboard. Android is the platform where it’ll really shine, so it’ll be interesting to see what kind of response from users the beta receives.
