US giants such as Apple and Microsoft are flocking to the U.K.to buy artificial intelligence (AI) start-ups as Britain establishes itself as the go-to place for the technology.
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SwiftKey apps will continue to be available for free on Android and iOS platforms.
Since SwiftKey’s founding eight years ago, the founders said the technology has saved users an estimated 10 trillion keystrokes across 100 different languages.
SwiftKey is the developer behind wildly popular keyboard apps for Android and iOS, and news of Microsoft’s acquisition stirred some concerns that the SwiftKey Keyboard app for iOS and Android would soon see its demise.
“In the coming months, we’ll have more to share about how we’ll integrate SwiftKey technology with our Guinness World Record Word Flow technology for Windows”, adds Harry Shum, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Technology and Research.
With SwiftKey the user swipes across letters in one stroke to spell words (it’s much quicker than pressing each letter individually, once you learn the technique), and the clever part is that the more you use it, the more the software “learns” your style and can better predict your next word.
Hundreds of millions of people around the world and numerous leading mobile manufacturers rely on SwiftKey’s language prediction technology.
Microsoft US computer muscle its capabilities in the field of artificial intelligence with the acquisition of United Kingdom startup SwiftKey, announced Wednesday by the two companies. “We think these are a flawless match, and we believe joining Microsoft is the right next stage in our journey”, SwiftKey notes in its press release. It looks like Microsoft are staying relevant by acquiring third-party apps.
The acquisition fits in Microsoft’s business focus on productivity apps and cloud computing. The purchase price was reported by the Financial Times. IBM (NYSE:IBM) recently expanded its AI platform Watson with new AI tools in the Watson Developer Cloud.
DeepMind – which began within the University of Oxford – was bought by Google in 2014, for £400m.
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It appears that Microsoft fully realizes the enormous importance and disruptive potential of advanced AI. The long term impact on Microsoft stock is likely to be positive.
