Swiftkey, the company known for its predictive and user-friendly keyboard has now been acquired by Microsoft. The terms and the conditions of the deal are not disclosed, but according to the report published on Financial Times, the deal is worth $250 million. The report also specifies that the founders, Jon Reynolds and Ben Medlock would get about $30 million, each.
Apart from their famous keyboard, the company is also known for its work behind the technology on Stephen Hawking’s wheelchair. The company takes pride in having a huge customer base of their keyboard. It boasts that their users have saved an estimate of 10 trillion keystrokes through its artificial intelligence. Many users have replaced their default keyboard app for phones and tablets with Swiftkey.
The Swiftkey keyboard learns your writing style and even predicts your next word through artificial intelligence which in turn helps you speed up your typing on the phone. It also scans texts from other sources to learn the popular sequences used and becomes smarter. The keyboard is available for Android and iOS. The point that Swiftkey syncs with what it learns from its users with the cloud, is what intrigued Microsoft. In fact, CEO Satya Nadella announced last June, that the intelligent cloud platform is one of the company’s three key investment areas and acquisitions have proven beneficial.
Someone acquainted with the deal told Financial Times that there’s a constant war for talent in artificial intelligence and companies like Google and Microsoft recognize the best. Swiftkey will stand strong like before, but the underlying technology will be utilized for other range of products of Microsoft. We sure have a lot of expectations, henceforth.
