Probably after years of careful planning, Microsoft has now found itself a way to extend its reach into Android and iOS even more by way of a proxy. Financial Times reports (link paywalled) that the acquisition of the London-based SwiftKey was concluded today in a deal that had cost Microsoft US$ 250 million (~RM 1,053.26 million). Under the deal, SwiftKey’s more than 150 employees and its two co-founders will now be joining the Microsoft Research team under the purview of the research team’s division chief.
According to Microsoft’s blog, SwiftKey started off in 2008 when Jon Reynolds and Ben Medlock got together to work on a better system of typing on smartphones; these devices that at the time were moving away from conventional keys to touch based input. SwiftKey is now said to be found on over 300 million Android and iOS devices, and is used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, including Stephen Hawking (who uses the same technology but with a specially developed language model). To date, SwiftKey users are estimated to have saved about 10 trillion keystrokes across the 100 different languages it currently supports. When added up, the time that SwiftKey has saved for humankind works out to a staggering 100,000 years. This is a phenomenal achievement for an app that came out on Android in 2010 and on iOS in January of 2014.
The acquisition will allow Microsoft to merge two development teams, of SwiftKey and of Microsoft’s own Word Flow keyboard, and believes that it can achieve much more than what either team could have on their own. The purchase will also allow Microsoft to bring its software and services to many more platforms, and to explore options to integrate SwiftKey’s technology into the range of Microsoft’s products and services that are available, including the aforementioned Word Flow. All these and more will be shared by Microsoft in the months to come, but for now, Android and iOS users only need to know that the apps will continue to be available for free.
With a focus on mobile and by leveraging its intelligent cloud solutions, Microsoft hopes to be able to create a more personal computing experience that anticipates, rather than respond to, users’ needs. Those are the things to come in the near future but the one thing that this acquisition is definitely going to do immediately is to raise some eyebrows at both Google and Apple. It will indeed heighten the race for AI supremacy between these giants, and I’m sure we’re all quite excited to see the outcome.
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