unknown is a new type that has been added in TypeScript 3. Before TypeScript 3, we may have used the any type when we weren't sure of all the properties and methods in an object from a third-party library. However, when we declare a variable with the any type, the TypeScript compiler won't do any type checking on it. The unknown type can be used in these situations to make our code more type-safe. This is because unknown types are type-checked. So, unknown can often be used as an alternative to any.

In the TypeScript playground, let's go through an example of a function using any and an improved version using unknown:

1. First, let's create a logScores function that takes in a parameter of type any. It logs out the name and scores properties from the argument to the console:

function logScores(scores: any) {
  console.log(scores.firstName); 
  console.log(scores.scores); 
}

2. Let's call this function with the following:

logScores({
  name: "Billy",
  scores: [60, 70, 75]
});

If we run the program, we get undefined followed by [60, 70, 75] in the console. We passed in a correct object parameter, but our function logs firstName instead of name to the console. The program compiled just fine and didn't produce an error at runtime, but didn't give the result we wanted. This is all because we told the compiler not to check any types with the any type.

3. Let's start to create a better version of this function with the unknown type:

function logScoresBetter(scores: unknown) {
  console.log(scores.firstName);
  console.log(scores.scores);
}

We immediately get compiler warnings where we reference the properties in scores:

So, the compiler is checking our scores variable now, which is great, and is even warning us about the firstName property. However, the scores property is also giving a complication error but is valid. So, how do we tell the compiler this? We need to explicitly do some type checking ourselves in our code. We'll cover a couple of ways of doing this in the following sections.