SwiftKey taps neural networks for a new keyboard app that could improve

SwiftKey Neural Alpha is effectively a re-enineering of the Swiftly platform and an experimental project out of SwiftKey’s “skunkworks department” called Greenhouse. While previous generations of SwiftKey’s keyboards began by predicting words only once they’d been partially typed, This keyboard takes the idea and expands upon it, using artificial neural networks to predict the next word in the sentence you’re in the middle of.

This means it can understand the meaning of the sentence before you fully type it. It learns your writing style over time to speed up typing, and even predicts the next word before you’ve started typing it – this is partly based on historical patterns, but it also scans texts from a myriad of sources to “learn” popular orders in which words are placed.

Swifkey was the world’s first keyboard to introduce a three-word suggestion bar above the keys that could pretty accurately predict your next word, powered by its “n-gram” technology which provides accurate predictions for common phrases.

If you thought SwiftKey for Android was already smart and intuitive, you’ll be excited to know the company has just finished working on a product which it claims is even smarter. If you intentionally attempt to think of sentences that are abnormal or disjointed, you’ll be out of luck.

This type of neural network language model has previously been available only on large servers, and this is the first time that something like this has been created to work on a smartphone or tablet.

It also understands that “Let’s meet at the airport” has a similar sentence structure to “Let’s chat at the office”.

Do you ever feel like your phone’s keyboard is dumb?

Neural networks are a “subfield” of artificial intelligence inspired by the way the human brain works. The new version is unique in that its predictions are calculated directly on the mobile device.

I interviewed SwiftKey CTO Ben Medlock onstage at the recent Re.

The current release of Neural is rough, and missing several features that make SwiftKey’s main release stand out, including the ability to sync multiple SwiftKey keyboards and the option to personalize the keyboard. However, it has limitations because it can’t understand the underlying meaning of words and has to be taught.