We are already facing another of those acquisitions that follow those that happened on WhatsApp, Instagram or Sunrise Calendar among many others. Services and apps that were born on mobile devices to give great results in different categories and that, thanks to the exponential growth of smartphones and tablets, managed to have millions of users using them daily around the world. In reality, the app market is being a great opportunity for a team of developers to launch an app or service and it can be used by millions of users so that at some point, some of the most important software companies notice them to finally acquire them.
One of those is Swiftkey from today on being bought by Microsoft for $ 250 million. A keyboard that has among its most notable features a word prediction that works excellently and that has been installed in hundreds of millions of smartphones. Jon Reynolds and Ben Medlock, who founded the company in 2008 while still in their 30s, will each get about $ XNUMX million for the purchase, which will be announced later this week. The two creators of the app have a part in company shares so that the rest is distributed among investors such as Accel Partens or Index Ventures
Your AI as maximum interest
Microsoft already has a "smart" virtual keyboard for both its tablets and smartphones. Justly recently released Word Flow on iOS with a special semi-circular interface so that you can type with only one finger and that has surprised many users of this popular operating system for mobile devices. A keyboard that will also come to Android, so the reasons for the purchase of SwiftKey are due to the Artificial Intelligence of the app itself.
This AI has been praised by Stephen Hawking himself that among its characteristics is a neural network that allows it to learn from the user himself so that he can get more out of the prediction of words so that the user communicates very quickly through all the apps that he may use with Swiftkey.
There is little to say for him great SwiftKey performance which has allowed it to continue to be among the best Android keyboards even with the arrival of the Google Keyboard a bit ago to the Play Store that got other keyboard apps to stay on the road so that now these two are the ones who share the reign in these types of applications.
What will happen to the future of Swiftkey?
Microsoft's interest is in the artificial intelligence of the keyboard. SwiftKey co-founder Jon Reynolds himself said they see themselves as a company specialized in language technology, so they find their real expression on a virtual keyboard. While in that war that now exists between the big ones like Google, Apple and Microsoft to acquire AI-centric companies, the purchase of SwiftKey is even more understood.
While SwiftKey possibly go your way just like so far and as has happened with previous Microsoft purchases like Skype or Minecraft (I hope it doesn't go the way of Sunrise Calendar), Microsoft could use its AI for products like Cortana. Natural language processing, learning and predictive technology could be key in getting Cortana to behave in a more natural and "human" way.
The details of the agreement have yet to be announced, and these will include whether the app will go its own way or become something similar to Sunrise, the calendar app that Microsoft acquired in 2015 and has already been flagged for discontinuation in less than a year. Of course, if Microsoft decides that SwiftKey will continue as its own app, Windows 10 users will surely be delighted that this is the case, since sooner or later they would have a version to be able to use it on their phones or tablets and thus access one of their latest and wonderful news.
For a fan that I am from the app that I acquired years ago in the Play Store and that is the one that i have been using for years, I hope that everything goes its way and Microsoft leaves everything as it is, since there are millions of users who use it daily. A few days and we will leave doubts.