Microsoft decides to orientate in the most meaningful way to artificial intelligence and announces that it has acquired Swiftkey, the London-based startup, founded in 2008 by Jon Reynolds and Ben Medlock. Swiftkey is currently the virtual keyboard for mobile smartphones and tablets, among the most used. The acquisition has cost 250 million dollars.
Microsoft decides to orientate in the most meaningful way to artificial intelligence and announces that it has acquired Swiftkey, the London-based startup, founded in 2008 by Jon Reynolds and Ben Medlock. Swiftkey is currently the virtual keyboard for mobile smartphones and tablets, among the most used. Total more than 300 million users and made his first appearance on Android in 2010 and just under two years ago also on iOS. The acquisition by the software giant, according to news broadcast today by the Financial Times, has cost 250 million dollars. The news was confirmed by Microsoft is that Swiftkey.
Microsoft from the official blog explains that soon the keyboard will be integrated in its Word Flow , the Windows Phone keyboard that soon it should arrive on the iPhone. Redmond explained that the acquisition of Swiftkey is absolutely “in line with our vision which is based on more personal computing experiences that anticipate our needs. It supports our ambition to reinvent productivity by leveraging the intelligent cloud.”
in pictures: Jon Reynolds and Ben Medlock
Swiftkey estimated that users who use the keyboard have saved 10 trillion keystrokes into 100 languages divers and, saving more than 100,000 years as a time to type the words on their mobile device. Swiftkey uses a mixture of artificial intelligence technologies to predict the next word that you are busy writing.
The acquisition by Microsoft is obviously not intended for use and all ‘ integration of the single keyboard , is certainly oriented towards developing artificial intelligence projects and for that reason has decided to integrate inside a startup that is already very skilled with the AI technologies. It will be interesting to see if there are any developments with Cortana, Microsoft’s virtual assistant.
Swiftkey was founded in 2008 by Jon Reynolds and Ben Medlock, two graduates of Cambridge University , and it is one of many startups British specializing in artificial intelligence acquired by an American giant of the technology. Another recent example was DeepMind, born within the University of Oxford, acquired by Google in 2014. Another example is VocallQ, startups specializing in speech recognition, which recently was acquired by Apple.
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