In a pivotal move from Microsoft, the tech giant purchased SwiftKey for a reported $250 million following their recent announcement to create an intelligent cloud platform. This directly relates to how SwiftKey improves and learns from user keystrokes stored in the cloud, which explains Microsoft’s interest in it.
The deal mutually benefits both parties as their interests align to create a better cloud and AI synergy.
Founders Jon Reynolds and Ben Medlock started developing SwiftKey in 2008 in an effort to create a time-efficient typing solution. SwiftKey works on the principle of the AI predicting the next word the user intends to write and bases this on context rather than relying fully on previous usage history.
SwiftKey launched in 2010 on Android and the iOS version followed suit four years later. The company estimates that it has spared its users of approximately 10 trillion keystrokes across 100 languages, saving more than 1,00,000 years in combined typing time.
[Via SwiftKey Blog]