by Angela Guess
Mary Toves recently wrote in PSFK, “When most people think of artificial intelligence, they think of Cylons, or Terminators, or HAL—sentient robots who turn on their masters in an effort to destroy the human race. But companies like SwiftKey, who are making helpful, smartphone-compatible artificial intelligence apps, are trying to change that. SwiftKey Neural Alpha is the world’s first artificially intelligent smartphone keyboard. The keyboard uses machine learning to help predict what words the user is likely to enter by understanding the way the user puts sentences together. ‘Human language itself is a pattern,’ said Michael Smith, VP of Product at SwiftKey. ‘It’s an expression of patterns that are going on in your thought process. The challenge is being able to distill that down into something that is for your phone and personal’.”
Toves goes on, “Since its launch last fall, the Android-only smartphone keyboard has put AI in the pockets of hundreds of thousands of users. SwiftKey Neural Alpha represents a trend in technology to shift AI away from bulky supercomputers like IBM’s Watson or the U.S. Government’s Titan. ‘Until now, neural network language models have been deployed mostly on large servers, requiring significant computational resources,’ the SwiftKey Team said. ‘The launch of SwiftKey Neural Alpha is a breakthrough as it marks the first time this type of language model technology has been engineered specifically to operate locally on a smartphone keyboard’.”
Photo credit: SwiftKey