Microsoft’s SwiftKey for Android app just released the world’s first keyboard that is powered by a neural network. The company had previously unveiled an alpha build of the app back in October last year. And now, Swiftkey has launched the official smartphone keyboard app powered by an artificial neural network which is more accurate and offers next-word predictions.
Until now, the smartphone keyboard functioning had never witnessed any major changes which could change the way we type. However, everything is about to change from now. The process of typing on a smartphone will get enhanced now, thanks to the SwiftKey for Android app which is now powered by Neural Network.
What changes SwiftKey has made?
Traditionally, the SwiftKey app had used the n-gram algorithm for word predictions in Android mobile phones. The n-gram algorithm relies on the prior usage of smartphone user for matching the pairs of words. The algorithm reads the last-typed two words, processes them and tries for predictions or suggestions from the large database. This system suggests three most probable words to complete your sentence.
But the problem with such algorithm arrives when it comes to match words according to their meanings and linguistic use. The overall efficiency of this algorithm is quite low and impractical after a certain time.
To deal with these issues, SwiftKey has launched the Neural Alpha which surpassed all those extra layers of word prediction and offered efficient keyboard experience. The system relies completely on the neural network instead of some pairs of words.
How new SwiftKey works?
In case you haven’t heard about a neural network, here’s an explanation for you. The neural network is the term which utilizes an algorithmic system mechanism which is similar to the way our brain neurons work. This system process data and constantly learns from the past experience, which is an efficient type of artificial intelligence.
The implementation of AI with the help of neural network offers superior text predictions while typing. The new keyboard is more intelligent and it understands the context to provide correct predictions and auto-correction. The keyboard now can understand the word similarity, complex word relationships and can analyze longer sentence contexts.
However, the new feature will not make any major impact on your typing. The new text prediction feature is the USP of SwiftKey while other functionalities will be the same as before.