$ 250 million deal Microsoft makes software maker Swiftkey – com-magazin.de

Microsoft buys the software maker Swiftkey for apparently $ 250 million. Especially the AI ​​capabilities of Britons are likely to be of interest to the Redmond company on the takeover.

Microsoft buys AI know-how: The Redmond company to take over the British software maker Swiftkey. According to the Financial Times the purchase price is expected to reach 250 million US dollars. The developer of the eponymous keyboard app for Android and iOS is likely to be of interest to Microsoft, mainly due to its expertise in the field of artificial intelligence. According to Microsoft, the app will be further developed and maintained in spite of the acquisition -. Swiftkey users need not therefore look for an alternative

Swiftkey uses AI for smart Typing

The Swiftkey app uses an intelligent word prediction, in order to facilitate smartphone and tablet users typing on the virtual keyboard. According to information the software is worldwide in over 300 million devices in use. Currently, the British are also working on a novel neural predictive text input, which takes into account the sentence context and the meaning of individual words with the predictions.

Swiftkey employs over 150 employees at the company locations in London, San Francisco and Seoul. Much of the workforce is to be active in the future in Microsoft’s development division Microsoft Research.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has secured with Swiftkey again mobile software know-how, which in the development its own services should be included. In recent years, the Group had already adopted the mailing App Acompli, the Sunrise calendar as well as the German Start-up Wunderlist. But while Acompli already been redesigned for Outlook app, the future of other services is still uncertain. Sooner or later, but are also likely to incorporate them in various Microsoft tools.

One potential use for Swiftkey technology could about Redmond’s digital assistant Cortana be that in the new Windows 10-prerelease already uses an intelligent word recognition to detect events and tasks from emails automatically.