More recently, Apple acquired an image recognition startup, Perceptio. DeepMind was, coincidentally, another London-based company like SwiftKey. Back in 2014, Google acquired DeepMind for $400 million or so. It's an area with much acquisition activity. Microsoft's recent offering of a facial recognition service that could intuit a person's emotions based on their facial expressions was one public-facing example of this, but more often we see these sort of AI tools being applied internally to power-specific parts of an application. From IBM with its Watson technology made famous by winning Jeopardy, to Google with its AI solutions being applied to email scanning and more, AI is the hallowed ground upon which vendors believe future value will be driven. Artificial Intelligence (or Ai to the cognoscenti) is a massive area of growth, and one in which a huge number of players are investing. This deal is about much more than typing, and it's much broader than a Microsoft-specific acquisition. All of this data is collected and analyzed in an effort to predict what a user is trying to type before they physically enter the words. SwiftKey is continually sifting through billions of different word and letter combinations, both from an individual and, more generally, in an anonymized way across its entire user base. The seemingly clairvoyant nature of SwiftKey when it comes to typing prediction can be readily implemented into a world of other use cases. Put simply, this is all about artificial intelligence. Bear in mind that SwiftKey isn't actually available on Windows Phone, so what is the rationale behind the deal? Microsoft recently acquired the company for an impressive reported price tag of $250 million. SwiftKey then offers predictions for words a user might want to type - with these predictions becoming stronger over time. SwiftKey not only has a great "swiping" offering that allows users to type without lifting their finger from the keyboard, but also does amazing things by analyzing a user's typing history (including their emails, social media missives, and text messages) and incrementally learning their usage patterns. SwiftKey is an incredible little offering that replaces the native keyboard on an iOS or Android device and makes typing much better.
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