Microsoft takes over Swiftkey – update

Microsoft has acquired Swiftkey, the British company behind the artificial intelligence keyboard application of the same name. Microsoft is said to have paid $250 million for Swiftkey, which was founded in 2008.

Microsoft has confirmed the acquisition of SwiftKey after earlier claims by the Financial Times about it. Microsoft continues to develop the app for Android and iOS, but also wants to integrate the technology into its World Flow keyboard for Windows 10 Mobile, iOS and Android. Swiftkey is headquartered in London and employs 150 people worldwide, including in San Francisco and Seoul. Many of them would start working at Microsoft Research, according to the FT.

It is not clear why the Redmond company acquired SwiftKey, but Microsoft may be interested in the artificial intelligence technology behind the keyboard app. SwiftKey uses this to predict what word the user is going to type. It has brought the app hundreds of millions of users worldwide.

Previously, SwiftKey used n-gram algorithms for this, where the predictions are based on word orders in previous, comparable sentence structures. Since last year, the British company has been using neural networks to make the app actually ‘understand’ what words mean and to make better suggestions. SwiftKey is therefore positioning itself more as a company in the field of language technology. Stephen Hawking’s wheelchair also contains the company’s technology to assist the scientist in communicating.

SwiftKey earns its money through Samsung and BlackBerry, among others, who put the app on devices as standard. Microsoft has acquired more popular apps in recent years to get its hands on technology for the mobile market, including e-mail service Acompli, Wunderlist for to-do lists and the calendar app Sunrise.

Update, 09.30: Microsoft has confirmed the acquisition. The message has been adjusted accordingly.