TouchPal, a very popular AI-powered virtual keyboard for Android devices (with more than 100m daily active users) recently unveiled Talia, a voice-activated intelligent assistant. While I prefer to live in the physical keyboard world (hello BlackBerry KEY2), using a virtual keyboard is pretty much inevitable if you have a modern smartphone.
TouchPal pairs Android keyboards to the functionality of all the apps we addictively use on the daily: Facebook, Instagram, Snap, LinkedIn, YouTube, Chrome, and so on. TouchPal learns from user input to personalize and proactively tailor recommendations, suggestions and custom content. It is also an ad-supported network and requires a ton of permissions in order to operate on your phone. Considering how much it needs to know in order to make your life (I guess) more streamlined, this makes sense. The company has stated it does not collect any personal information.
Talia is an add-on to the TouchPal virtual keyboard that offers active, intelligent recommendations based on user input from the TouchPal keyboard. It can provide things like instant restaurant recommendations, customized emojis and real-time weather reports all while you are typing text messages, emails or posting on social media. Basically, it reduces the need to switch from app to app when composing a message that relies on external information pertinent to the conversation.
Instead of passive assistance based on direct user commands (like Siri or Google Assistant), Talia provides active support all tied to the Android keyboard itself. It's more of an intuitive system that anticipates need based on conversational input, rather than waiting for you to ask it something. Talia sits at the top right edge of the keyboard and you can use it to search for things within a conversation and then share that information with whomever you are chatting with.
Additional features include automatic currency conversion, GIF predictions that replace certain words with relevant GIFs, a built-in mathematics calculator and a swift paste feature that predicts when previously copied information can be useful from the clipboard history. While none of this will effectively alter your day-to-day life, it will make it easier to stay in the conversation and not app switch when trying to make plans or post a joke about the weather on Twitter.
You can download the latest version of TouchPal with Talia from the Google Play store. It is not available for Apple iPhone devices, just Android.