Microsoft gives Swiftkey a brain: Neural networks to power all your typing needs

Most Android users must be familiar with Swiftkey, that decidedly awesome keyboard with an uncanny ability to predict your next words. That keyboard was good, but it’s latest update makes it even better.

Swifkey’s prediction mechanism depended on the so-called n-gram model, which only looked at the previous two words before coming up with a suggestion. It also learned from your writing style.

It was good enough to beat most keyboards on the market, but n-gram doesn’t understand context. Microsoft, who bought Swiftkey a while ago, have now updated the algorithm to support “neural networks.” That’s a fancy way of saying that Swiftkey now understands context.

As Microsoft explains, if you’re typing “let’s meet at the… ,” Swiftkey would only look at “at the” and predict “time” or “moment”, or words of that nature.

The updated algorithm (the neural network) will look at your sentence as a whole and figure out what you’re trying to say. The result, claim Microsoft, is a prediction mechanism that’s far more reliable than it’s ever been. In the above example, Swiftkey will now predict “hotel,” “restaurant,” “airport,” etc.

As with all neural networks today, Microsoft trained Swiftkey with “millions of sentences.” The updated Swiftkey app is available on the Google Play store and currently supports UK and US English languages.