Founded in 2008, SwiftKey built a big following on Android as an alternative to the stock keyboard app on phones and tablets, though it later launched for iOS after Apple opened up to third-party keyboards.
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Almost one year ago, SwiftKey launched its Neural Alpha keyboard on Android, which used neural networks to make smarter and more meaningful word suggestions.
Neural networks are a system of connections that have been inspired by the biological neural networks like that of the human mind.
This means the keyboard will now begin to understand relationships between words and sentence structures you have used in the past.
As with most neural network-powered tech, the prediction engine will improve with use as it learns a user’s personal language and writing style.
On an interesting note, SwiftKey is the first firm to incorporate neural networks to its keyboard.
For example, when you wrote the phrase “I’ll meet you at the” with SwiftKey keyboard earlier, the app used to suggest words like “moment”, “same” etc., with its “n-gram” technique. Today’s update, which is live in the Google Play Store, marks the first major overhaul of the app since its creation.
On Thursday, Microsoft released a new version of its SwiftKey for Android that includes an AI technology called a neural network to try to improve its performance.
To achieve this, SwiftKey has trained its app with millions of sentences. However, it is not that the company is introducing neutral networks to its keyboard out of the blue as it released an app called Neural Alpha, which used this same technology, on Google Play in October a year ago.
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SwiftKey had reported in an official blog that this new update will now be able to capture the similarity and relationship in between the words more meaningfully. It’s also worth noting here that the feature is limited to U.S. and U.K. English for now, though the company does say that more languages are coming. However, the app will be out for other languages also in the upcoming months.
