Last month Microsoft released their Word Flow keyboard for iOS, much at the chagrin of Windows Phone fans, to continue their focus on getting Microsoft products and services on other platforms.Īccording to Microsoft, this purchase of SwiftKey continues the cross platform effort and is all about synergy: It does not surprise me at all that Microsoft is making this acqui-hire for the talent and intellectual property because it will only help to make the companies own Word Flow keyboard even better. After asking on Twitter, someone pointed me towards SwiftKey and I never looked back because it was a terrific keyboard with plenty of options to make it work very well. Last year, when I spent 6 months on Android, I struggled with the standard keyboards and really missed the Word Flow keyboard on Windows Phone. That technology, according to SwiftKey, is built upon an estimated 10 trillion keystrokes in 100 languages and they estimate users have saved over 100,000 years of time using SwiftKey.

The rumors about this acquisition began yesterday and now today they are confirmed by both companies through their official websites.įor those who may not be aware, SwiftKey is based in the United Kingdom and have built a cross platform (iOS and Android) on-screen keyboard that uses a language prediction that is based on artificial intelligence.

Microsoft buys swiftkey