Using The New QuickPath Keyboard To Swipe-Type On Your iPhone Or iPad

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. On this episode let's take a look at swipe typing on the iPhone and iPad using iOS 13.

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So Swipe typing isn't new because you could, for a while now, add third party keyboards and many of those third party keyboards supported swipe typing. However what's new is now it's built in to iOS. So you can do it with a native keyboard. It works really well. Swipe typing can significantly speedup your typing, especially on the iPhone where most of us are just tapping with one finger.

Let's take a look at me doing it on the iPhone. I'm not doing here at full speed. I'm doing it a little bit slower and more deliberately to show you how it works. So Apple's name for swipe typing is QuickPath. The way to use it is to just use the regular keyboard. So you could be tapping out letters just like you normally do and then switch without having to turn on any control or anything. Just switch to QuickPath. Just tap on the first letter and without lifting up your finger move your finger to the next letter and the next letter and the next letter until you complete the word. The lift your finger up. Then the word should appear and it knows this is a complete word so the next time you tap on a letter and start swiping around it knows it's doing another word. So the space is automatic. You can switch between tapping individual letters and swiping as much as you want. 

There's a few things you should know about swipe typing. First is you don't have to be perfect. You don't have to get your finger over the exact letters. As a matter of fact you can sometimes even skip letters because it's kind of going to figure out what's the most likely thing that you're trying to swipe type and it's going to put it there. The second thing is that it doesn't always get it right. A lot of words are very close to each other on the keyboard and it's going to, sometimes, pick the wrong one. But if you look closely at the top of the keyboard you'll see the predictions there and most of the time when it gets it wrong the right one is one of those words. So you just quickly tap that, correct the word, and then move on.

There are a couple of settings we should look at. Go into Settings and then in General, Keyboard, at the bottom you'll see the settings for QuickPath. Now strangely Apple doesn't call it QuickPath here. They call it Slide to Type. So you've got an On and Off switch for that. If you have it On there's another option for Delete Slide-to-Type by Word. So what happens there is if you type a word and you hit the Delete key immediately afterwards the entire word gets deleted. This can speed things up as if you get a word really wrong hit Delete once and then you try again.

Let's take a look at me doing this on the iPad. The iPad is a little different because the default keyboard, the one that fills the whole bottom half of the screen, that one doesn't do swipe typing. But the new floating keyboard in iOS 13 does. So you have to switch to that. So to switch to the floating keyboard you want to tap and hold the keyboard button at the right and then switch to Floating. Now you get a keyboard that is basically the same size as the iPhone keyboard. You can use QuickPath on it. So you can type here. It works the same way. It feels just like typing on the iPhone. I guess the idea is that you're going to be doing QuickPath with one finger anyway so don't have the keys spread out all over the keyboard so you're moving your arm around to do it. 

But you can, of course, move the floating keyboard around. So you can position it on the screen where it's not in the way of other things and it's most comfortable for you to touch.

Now swipe typing isn't magic. You still need to work at typing. It's just going to speed things up a little bit. It's not going to get things perfect but neither is pecking at each individual key. Once you get used to it it definitely does improve your speed. It can take a few seconds off of responding to a text message. It can make typing a response to an email much quicker and if you do a lot of writing on your iPhone or iPad you can definitely see a speed improvement as you get better at it.