Microsoft bought SwiftKey, the company from Redmond acquiring the company behind the most popular third-party keyboard developed for mobile terminals, the sum of 250 million dollars being spent for this strategic investment.
Although at first glance the purchase seems to be based on the desire of those from Microsoft to have a specialized engineers on the development of third-party keyboards, in reality the company Microsoft bought SwiftKey for the artificial intelligence system developed by her.
SwiftKey is used by over 300 million users on the iOS and Android platforms, and despite the fact that we are talking about a considerable amount, many investors stated that it is lower than what they would have expected to see a few years ago.
SwiftKey has over 150 employees in the whole world and a good part of them will be integrated into Microsoft Research to develop artificial intelligence designed to predict everything that users intend to write and to offer them the right recommendations.
Microsoft already has a keyboard called for Windows Phone Word flow, it will also be ported to the iOS platform during this year, so the theory regarding the artificial intelligence software has more logic than the purchase based only on the standard software for the virtual keyboard.
For now, no one knows if Microsoft will maintain or update the SwiftKey application and the related keyboard in the future, but there are chances that it will be withdrawn, although it has a very large user base behind it.
