Starting today, keyboard app SwiftKey will be running on a neural network. The company introduced the neural network into their app with an aim to 'understand the language at a deeper level'. The latest version of the app brings this feature, and is already available on Google Play for Android. The company did not announce any timeline for the update to come on iOS. "For the first time since we launched SwiftKey Keyboard six years ago, we’ve rebuilt SwiftKey’s language engine from the ground up using the power of neural network technology – the first instance of neural networks being used locally on a smartphone. This gives you more accurate and useful next-word predictions, saving you time and (hopefully) adding a little fun to your typing," the company said in a blog post. SwiftKey had announced the release of the SwiftKey Neural Alpha in October last year, which ran as an early experimental prototype. The company claims that it received an enthusiastic response from users with the prototype keyboard. According to SwiftKey, the neural network enabled keyboard will be able to understand the context of sentence. For example, if you have previously typed a phrase like "Let's meet at a cafe", the keyboard will understand that words like 'home' or 'office' are similar to cafe, and will be able to predict them in place of 'cafe'. The software will also offer the most appropriate predictions and autocorrections based on the sentence frame being typed. SwiftKey will initially roll out the neural network for UK English and US English, but says that more languages will get the feature soon.
