Microsoft is boosting to its efforts in artificial intelligence by acquiring SwiftKey, a British startup that makes a popular predictive typing app as well as the language software that powers the computer on Stephen Hawking’s wheelchair.
Microsoft is paying $250 million for SwiftKey two years after Facebook also tried to buy the startup, according to sources with knowledge of the matter.
The deal with Microsoft follows the software giant's acquisition of several productivity apps for mobile over the last year, including e-mail app Accompli and to-do-list app Wunderlist. What makes its purchase of SwiftKey unique is that the startup of 150 employees will be working under Harry Shum’s Technology and Research Group, rather than under a mobile app development team.
Microsoft said it would integrate SwiftKey’s technology into its Word Flow technology for Windows, but may also take advantage of the company's expertise in A.I. to help with its wider efforts in machine learning.
“Microsoft has seen a shift in strategy which means it’s looking across the various platforms including mobile... which is absolutely where SwiftKey can add huge amounts of value,” said Jo Oliver a partner at London’s Octopus Ventures, which became SwiftKey’s first institutional investor in 2010.
Cambridge graduates Jon Reynolds (a Forbes 30 Under 30 alumnus) and Ben Medlock founded SwiftKey in 2008 as a keyboard app that learned the most common words a smartphone user would type, and then predicted them to help type faster.
For a while it made money by selling a subscription to the app, and also by licensing its technology to manufacturers like Samsung and BlackBerry to integrate the technology on their native keyboards.
SwiftKey’s app couldn’t get on iOS for most of its life because of Apple’s closed policy on core iOS features like the keyboard. Then in 2014 Apple launched its own version of a predictive keyboard. That year SwiftKey went free and was also finally able to launch an app for iOS.
Earlier that year Facebook contacted SwiftKey and the two sides reached advanced discussions about an acquisition, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the talks, with founders Reynolds and Medlock meeting Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The discussions eventually ended, with SwiftKey’s founders preferring at that time to remain independent. A spokeswoman for SwiftKey declined to comment.
Facebook may have been interested in SwiftKey’s artificial intelligence technology technology and expertise in natural language processing, which is fundamental to its ability to learn from a person’s everyday language and predict what they’re most likely to say next.
Software related to language and speech recognition is becoming increasingly valuable as Silicon Valley’s big tech companies race to build A.I. that best responds to humans. In January, Facebook bought San Francisco startup Wit.ai, which sold software that made it easier for developers to create apps using voice recognition.
Artificial intelligence is forming an increasingly important role at Facebook with the development of its digital assistant M, which relies on human agents but also uses machine learning technology to better automate its conversations with users.
At the start of 2016, Zuckerberg said that his personal goal for the year would be to build a digital butler for his home, powered by artificial intelligence.
Microsoft’s ambitions in A.I. run just as deep and are key to the development of its Cortana digital assistant on Windows Phones. Its acquisition of SwiftKey is a “strong reflection of the quality of the research and academic work being produced at British universities,” said Martin Mignot, a partner at Index Ventures, which also invested in SwiftKey. Mignot pointed out that Silicon Valley has eyed several startups in the UK specializing in artificial intelligence. Google bought Deep Mind in 2014 for more than $500 million
Later that year it also bought Dark Blue Labs and Vision Factory, two companies that had been spun out from Oxford University which reportedly specialized in machine learning and computer vision.
SwiftKey’s founders have waded into the recent debate about the implications of AI for our future, which have included concerns voiced by Stephen Hawking and Tesla billionaire Elon Musk, who called A.I. our “biggest existential threat.” Medlock, who acted as CTO of SwiftKey and did his PhD in machine learning, said last month that the danger of A.I was, “at the very least a long way off.”
“Eight years ago we started out as two friends with a shared belief that there had to be a better way of typing on smartphones,” Medlock and Reynolds said in a blog post today. “We’ve come a long way since then.” SwiftKey was focused on enhancing interaction between people and technology, they added. “We think these are a perfect match, and we believe joining Microsoft is the right next stage in our journey.”
