Simple Ways to Type Faster in Android

Do you know, an average person spend around 3 hours each day with their smartphones. This is like 18 percent of our working life. And since we are already using it that much, it make sense to use it effectively. Now one way of doing that is by typing faster. Weather we are replying to text or searching something on the internet, We type all the time.

Type Faster in Android

Make a habit to use gesture typing. This is a built-in feature on Google keyboard and can boost your speed up to three times. For those who don’t know what gesture typing is, well basically you have to move your finger over the letters without stoping.

For instance if you were to type hello, instead of typing one alphabet a time i.e. [h, e, l, l, o], you will swipe you fingers over the letters without taking off you hand.

However, it’s not always accurate, but there is ways to make it efficient. For instance, turn off ‘text correction’ , ‘block offensive words ‘ etc from keyboard preference. If you don’t get a word right for the first time, press and hold three vertical dots for suggestion.

Another good way of typing faster is by not typing at all i.e. use — voice option. Google voice search is integrated in most apps, which appear as small microphone symbol either in the keyboard or search bar. When you say something, your words go to google server for interpretation and then it types. So it may be slow but it’s accurate.

Another feature that I use more often than I though, I would is — personal dictionary. With this option, you can create abbreviation for your frequently type words.

A good example would be our email address. We use it while creating a new account, or sending our contact info over text. So instead of typing that long string of text, you can type short code of it.

Special symbols always slow us down. So if you want to quickly access common symbols, simply by long pressing the ‘ . ‘  (period) symbol. This is useful to quickly access @ or / that are not available on front keyboard.

Let say, you are typing in all lower case and want next letter to be upper case, then swipe your finger from up arrow key to letter.

Similarly if you are in number mode, press and hold the ABC button and then swipe to 1,2,3 at the top, you will get something like this.

If you want to convert a long text from upper case to lower case or want to capitalize only the first letter, then highlight the text and use the up arrow key, to toggle between the case.

See the above tips in action. (gif)

Conclusion

We have seen few tips and tricks to type faster in android, without using any third party keyboard. I like to stick around with stock Google keyboard mainly because of two reason.

First third party keyboard use extra space and second they collect you data to improve prediction. Now I know even Google collects data, but it’s better to have one person having your data then multiple.