According to a statistic released by the United States Health Department, more than 2 percent of children suffer from a form of autism. In order to help them cope with their condition and assist their communication, Swiftkey comes up with something unexpected on the market. Swiftkey develops an application for autistic children capable of offering them a viable means of communication with the outside world.

For those of us who are unaware about the company, Swiftkey, some time ago, devised a system that ultimately revolutionized mobile keyboards. Basically, based on your gestures, the application is able to provide with word suggestion and predictions. Covering the same principle as its predecessor, the new application aimed to help children from autism spectrum disorder has the same capabilities when it comes to core prediction.

According to Swiftkey’s spokesperson, the application itself, named Symbol, was designed by several staff members who have children suffering from autism spectrum disorder. Knowing how much their children have to endure when it comes to communication, several member of the staff got together a created a freeware application.

Basically, the application is using pictures and symbols in order to create an intelligible message. Users are able to select from any number of pictures in order to compose their messages. Moreover, all users will be able to create their own gallery of pictures in order to express variable emotions. And, by incorporating standard Swiftkey technology, the application is capable of recording your most common expression and give you suggestions in future messages.

The application can offer other facilities. For example, the app has a built-in text-to-speech engine, that can play back messages as you receive them and the ever popular read aloud function.

Of course, looking on the market, we see that Swiftkey isn’t the only company that came with this kind of product. For example, there is another application on Apple’s Online Store which is capable of doing basically the same things as Swiftkey. Unfortunately, the price alone is not enticing. TouchChat is the name of the application, and in order to use it, you must pay 150 dollars.

But, according to Swiftkey, their application is not only free for download but it actually is faster and more reliable than any other application available on the market. The application will surely prove to be beneficial to all persons who are suffering from autism spectrum disorder.

In order to download the application, you must sign-in to your Google account and search the Play Store for the application.

Photo credits:www.wikipedia.org