Slash 3.0

Connected Services, Categories, Swipe Typing & more

Today we are excited to introduce the biggest update of Slash to date. We’ve been tirelessly working to bring you this version, with big improvements to the typing experience, the sharing experience, all new services, a redesigned Host App, and more. We can’t wait for you to see it.

Slash was originally built on the idea that you could seamlessly share the content that matters most, without leaving your conversation. With the new and improved Host App, you can now connect your favorite apps to your keyboard to share your own personal content. The feature works differently for each service. Take Spotify for example, everyone loves sharing music, but we don’t always know what to search for when given an empty search bar... Connecting with Spotify or Soundcloud allows Slash users to see their own saved libraries, playlists, likes, and more, making it easier to share the songs you actually care about. Users can connect with Twitter to share their own tweets, view and share tweets from their personal feed, and see recent likes, all without leaving the conversation. We’ve added some new services as well to enhance this feature, including Instagram to share your own photos, Google Drive to seamlessly send files to peers, LinkedIn to share a “Digital Business Card”, and a few more.

We’ve also added a new Profile tab in the Host App for you keep track of all your connected services, your Custom Slashes, all your recent shares, and your keyboard themes. If you’ve explored this already, you’ve probably already found a set of new colorful themes we added…trust us, this will definitely get the attention of that person sitting next to you on the subway. Simply connect with Facebook (another new service) to create your Slash Profile.

What else is new? We’ve tossed in some much-needed search inspiration by adding categories to our favorite services. Not only does this allow you to bounce from trending content in services to personal content (as mentioned), it also helps you decide just what to share when you can’t think of the perfect reaction (Giphy & Sticker), recommendation (Youtube, Twitter & New York Times), or destination (Foursquare).

Finally, Swipe Typing. We know you’ve been asking for it, so we had to build it. With swipe typing, you can type (or search) by gliding your fingers over the letters, without pecking at each key individually. Swipe Typing interprets your gestures and figures out the word you meant to type. Once you use it, you can’t go back… trust us. Swipe only works on iOS devices as of now, but we’re hoping to bring it to Android soon 😉.

Beyond that, you’ll have to download Slash from the Apple App Store, or Google Play Store to see everything. What we think is truly special about Slash is the way it was built under the hood, as a Platform, to host over 25 different apps right inside your keyboard. In the coming weeks we are announcing this platform as an SDK for any app to seamlessly integrate a Slash-like toolbar to their chat client by dragging and dropping the services they want... I won’t give too much away, but we are super excited about this. As always, we are continually improving Slash and are open to feedback. Shoot us a message at hello@tapslash.com. We’d love to hear any thoughts, concerns, ideas, etc. Happy sharing!