Quill Flow vs SwiftKey: Microsoft Stopped Building It a Long Time Ago

Read the changelog

We are not going to claim SwiftKey has not been updated, because it has. Builds ship. What has not shipped is a product. Here is what Microsoft has told App Store users it changed, verbatim, across eighteen months of releases.

That is what a keyboard on life support looks like. Somebody at Microsoft is keeping it compiling against new OS releases and nobody is deciding what it should become. Compare it against what the keyboard category has done in the same period: Gemini dictation, on-device rewriting, gesture decoders that use language models, autocorrect that adapts to individual users. SwiftKey has watched all of it happen.

The “AI Keyboard” in the App Store name

The listing is called Microsoft SwiftKey AI Keyboard. The AI in question is a Copilot button that opens a chatbot, which arrived in 2024 when Microsoft renamed the Bing button it had bolted on in 2023. It is a shortcut to a separate assistant, sitting in your keyboard toolbar. It is not AI applied to typing, and it is not AI applied to dictation.

That distinction matters because it is the entire difference between the two products. Quill Flow’s AI is not a button that summons something else. It runs on the text you are actually writing: transcribing your voice, punctuating it, cutting the filler, matching the format to the app you are in, and letting you retone the result.

Voice typing: English only

This is the gap that should decide it for most people, and it is on Microsoft’s own support site: “Currently we support English only for voice to text.”

On iPhone, SwiftKey routes your voice to Microsoft speech services. On Android you get SwiftKey’s multimodal voice typing or, if you prefer, a handoff to Google’s voice IME, which requires the Google app installed and current. Either way, English or nothing, and either way it is transcription: no filler removal, no formatting pass, no rewriting.

Quill Flow dictates in 100+ languages including Hinglish, ships its interface in 35, and cleans up every one of them the same way.

Head to head

SwiftKey invented swipe typing, then stopped improving it

Give SwiftKey its due. Gesture typing and n-gram word prediction on mobile are genuinely its legacy, and the multilingual prediction that let you type five languages without switching was years ahead of everyone. Microsoft bought it in 2016 for a reported quarter of a billion dollars because it was the best in the category.

Then the category moved. Modern swipe decoding treats a gesture as a noisy observation of an intended path and scores candidate words against both the shape and a language model, which is what Quill Flow’s SHARK-squared decoder does. Modern autocorrect does the same thing for taps: measure where your thumbs actually land relative to where each key is drawn, learn your personal offset, and shift the hit test toward the key you meant. Quill Flow arbitrates ambiguous taps against a language model before the letter is even drawn, which cuts pre-render errors by roughly a quarter for the sloppiest typists.

None of that is exotic. It is just what happens when someone is still working on the problem.

Auto-formatting, corrections, and emoji

Dictate into Quill Flow and punctuation, capitalization, and grammar are applied as the text is written. Filler words and false starts never reach the page. Voice Activity Detection trims the pauses so your thinking time does not become whitespace. The keyboard reads which app it is in, so an email is formatted like an email and a chat message is not. None of this exists in SwiftKey, whose voice input hands you a raw transcript.

On the typing side: missing spaces are repaired, so “seeyoutomorrow” comes back as three words. A held backspace escalates from letters to whole words instead of crawling. An autocorrect you have undone twice stops being offered. And two keyboard languages can be active at once with their dictionaries merged, so suggestions and swipe candidates come from both at the same time rather than from whichever one you last selected. SwiftKey supports more languages at once than our two; what our two get is a single shared corrector, and the collision handling that makes it safe. It is written up here.

Emoji get real attention rather than a panel. There is an optional emoji row directly on the keyboard, so picking one does not mean leaving the letters and finding your way back, and the picker keeps your frequents in front. On iPhone, emoji search matches aliases, the localized keyword set, and names all at once, so “sad” returns the five faces you meant rather than one; skin tone is remembered per emoji with a global default; and typing a word offers its emoji in the suggestion bar so you can accept it the same way you accept a word. Those three land on Android next.

The privacy question

SwiftKey has a long history here, including a 2016 incident where its sync surfaced other people’s email addresses as predictions. Today it sends voice clips to Microsoft for processing and improvement unless you opt out, and its one new feature of the last eighteen months is uploading your typing data to OneDrive.

Quill Flow sends audio to a server to transcribe it and discards it the moment the request completes. Voice recordings, transcribed text, and formatted output are never stored, nothing you dictate trains a model, and the dictation history you see in the app is held locally and never leaves your phone. That is in the privacy policy, not just in marketing copy.

Who should stay on SwiftKey

You want a free keyboard, you type in English, you do not dictate, you like SwiftKey’s prediction bar, and you have no interest in anything else a keyboard could do. It is stable and it is genuinely good at the narrow thing it does. There is nothing wrong with that.

Who should switch to Quill Flow

You dictate, or you would if it were good. You write in a language that is not English. You want the words cleaned up rather than transcribed. You want autocorrect that adapts to your thumbs rather than to an average. Or you have looked at SwiftKey’s changelog and worked out that nobody is coming.