SwiftKey's Neural Network Keyboard Adds Three New Languages

SwiftKey is shaking up the way its keyboard works, and it involves neural networks. This is a first for keyboards, according to the company, and it better enables it to understand what a person is trying to type. The SwiftKey language engine was remade from the ground up, and unlike before, it can now better predict the rest of your sentence by looking at the whole rather than only parts of it. Thanks to the new technology, the keyboard can even make accurate predictions for sentences it hasn't previously been exposed to.

SwiftKey announced the new rebuilt mobile keyboard a couple weeks ago, but it was only available for English speakers of both the UK and US varieties. The company has apparently been hard at work, though, and now it is offering the app for those who speak French, German, and Spanish.

That makes the keyboard more useful for all the multi-lingual users out there, and makes it available to a wider user base. As with the English keyboard, the other language support brings the same predictive features, as explained in the video above.

Rather than looking at, say, the last two letters of the sentence you're typing, the new language engine pays attention to all of the words, intelligently discerning what it is you intend to type. The word "a," for example, is understood to represent a single thing, while other words will be understood in context to both other words in the sentence and the word's definition in general.

You can grab the new SwiftKey keyboard from Google Play here. The new language support is available in the beta here.

SOURCE: SwiftKey (1), (2)