SwiftKey’s new app could one day write entire emails for you

For everyone else, you can find SwiftKey Neural Alpha available right now for free in the Google Play Store. But it’s for this reason that the London-based company elected to launch a separate, standalone app rather than integrate the features into its existing flagship app.

Neural networks is a subfield of artificial intelligence that is inspired by the structure and operation of the human brain.

SwiftKey Neural Alpha is effectively a re-enineering of the Swiftly platform and an experimental project out of SwiftKey’s “skunkworks department” called Greenhouse.

Ben Medlock, the company’s co-founder took to Medium to explain the motivation behind this new Artificial Neural Network technology, saying that it was always the company’s aim to make typing faster, and predictions better so that you spend less time typing and correcting. This is in contrast to SwiftKey’s existing n-gram model, which relates to probability and computational linguistics. It’s different from keyboard apps using traditional “n-gram” technology to predict the likelihood of your next word based on common phrases or things you’ve typed previously. Knowing this similarity allows SwiftKey to also predict “home” when you have typed “Let’s meet at”.

“It [neural networks] gives the ability for SwiftKey to predict and suggest words in a way that’s more meaningful and more like how language is actually used by people”, said SwiftKey chief marketing officer (CMO) Joe Braidwood in an interview with VentureBeat. You’ll use it at your own risk, where the risk is you get an app that doesn’t get updated and might not work a few months down the road – not too bad.

Eventually, the company hopes to create the first ever “neural network language” model for a smartphone keyboard. The refresh brought in real-time visual translation (e.g. of signs) in 20 more languages, and this was made possible due to convolutional neural networks. It’s more than likely that, in time, your keyboard will be able to predict an entire sentence.

Artificial intelligence technology being developed by SwiftKey could eventually write whole sentences, or maybe even whole emails, for you. Just like other technologies that we’ve seen that leverage neural nets, Swiftkey’s keyboard is eerily good at recognising context.