Microsoft Is Acquiring London’s AI-Driven Swiftkey for $250M

Hitting the middle button on SwiftKey &quot;neural alpha&quot; repeatedly:<p>I have a few questions for you to see if you can get me a copy of the letter to the office and I will be in touch with you to discuss the position with you and your family are doing well and that you are not the only one I have to say that I am a beautiful person and I love you and I love you and I love you and I love you and I love you and I love you and I love you and I love you and I love you and I love you and I love you and I love you and I love you and I love you and I love you and I love you

It&#x27;s a good acquisition in that it&#x27;s a great product used by many people.<p>I can&#x27;t help thinking about the privacy angle - Microsoft gets to capture everything you type into your Android keyboard.<p>And yes I wear my tinfoil hat often.

The Financial Times says:<p>&quot;Nonetheless, one person close to the company said the sale price was lower than investors might have hoped for a couple of years ago, when Swiftkey was among the most popular smartphone apps in the world.&quot;<p>It is an unfortunately timed exit.<p>If they had sold even a year ago, they could have done much better.

Awesome exit for them but, darn it, there goes another great app. Destined to become a shadow of its former self.

Is it just me that I find Microsoft implementation of swype typing better than swiftkey on iOS (I haven&#x27;t used Android). I hope they are using the buyout for swiftkeys spread on android and iOS, or to get more information about what users are searching&#x2F;typing. And I hope we can see the AI on Windows 10 swype feature percolate into swiftkey products.

There is no other keyboard out there which can predict multiple languages without clumsy language switching.<p>Fuck, now all the data will be mined by Microsoft. Another great product FUBARed, just like Sunrise.

As a person who has and uses (lightly) a Windows Mobile phone running the Windows 10 beta, I&#x27;d love to see it become a&#x2F;the keyboard option on there. The native keyboard isn&#x27;t terrible once you learn some of the things it can do, but it still pales in comparison to SwiftKey, and I don&#x27;t even make full use of the predictive buttons because I&#x27;m so used to sweeping.<p>I&#x27;ll note that in the search &#x2F; address bar of Firefox, if I type &quot;ne&quot; the three options it predicts are &quot;ne&quot;, &quot;news.ycombinator.com&quot;, and &quot;news.google.com&quot;, where the same entry in a text field gives more expected values.

I&#x27;ve honestly found my SwiftKey experience getting significantly worse over time to the point where I&#x27;m ready to drop it entirely.<p>The predictions&#x2F;autocompletes just seem completely batshit crazy compared to when I first started using it.<p>Although if Microsoft are the new owners of the software then I&#x27;m definitely going to drop it anyway.

Wow. People don&#x27;t talk about it too much in the same breath as all of the new trendy AI stuff, but Swiftkey has been doing incredibly smart input work for years, and is probably the most actually-useful AI app available for Android. I think I had it since it&#x27;s earliest days, like 2009 or 2010?

I&#x27;m using SwiftKey constantly for normal typing, and it&#x27;s got a great autocorrect feature. Not using the AI (word suggestion&#x2F;prediction) at all. Yet it drives me regularly insane, especially when typing technical terms, abbreviations and http addresses, because it just refuses to accept that there sometimes just has to be NO space after a dot. Also writing uppercase seems to be a hard task for SwiftKey. I&#x27;d like them to enhance the AI this way: if SwiftKey recognizes permanent violations of their built in rules, just ask the user if he wants SwiftKey to ignore certain rules. I assume something can be configured, but I didn&#x27;t even bother searching for it (because lazy and afraid to get lost in the huge settings menu).

This is frustrating, Microsoft announced that they were going to port the excellent Windows Phone keyboard to iOS and I was hoping it would come to Android too.

IMHO, the stock keyboard on Surface devices is barely functional. It looks nice but lacks a lot of features that I am used to from my (non Microsoft) mobile devices. I am hoping this acquisition is a move to improve that technology.

For me Swiftkey was a favourite until it broke in so many subtle and not so subtle ways: insisting on changing i to I (i is the local word for in so incredibly frustrating), other times it will split combined words making me look like an English-speaking or worse, local teenager. No amount of tweaking, correcting, updating or even filing bugs seems to work.<p>So now I use the default keyboard.

&gt; Here’s how SwiftKey works:<p>That video was not the explanation I was hoping for, but a voiceover ad...

I wonder if this is going to have implications for Swiftkey&#x27;s privacy policy and data mining etc. if Windows 10 is anything to go by...

Okey. I&#x27;m trying Fleksy then.

Congratulations to the team at SwiftKey!<p>I know there&#x27;s a high concentration of awesome engineering talent there. So I wonder whether this acquisition is primarily for the talent or for the potential monetisation opportunities?

Ahhh I can&#x27;t stand swift key. Windows flo or what ever it is kills this already. Swift key doesn&#x27;t learn and consistently suggests wrong words even after 2 years of use.<p>Personal opinion.

Sad that after all those years Apple&#x2F;iOS still doesn&#x27;t have a keyboard with swypeing and voice input combined, or did I miss anything?

Absolutely ridiculous price for something most people don&#x27;t even know about.

Just uninstalled it.

If you have the app installed I would suggest turning off auto-update from the store so that you can keep the keyboard as-is before Microsoft starts meddling with it.