Microsoft is getting its hands on more than just a popular app.
Josh Miller/CNET
Microsoft is buying SwiftKey, but the tech giant isn't as interested in the popular predictive keyboard app as it is its artificial intelligence brains.
The tech titan confirmed Wednesday it has acquired the app, which is installed on more than 300 million handsets. Microsoft paid around $250 million for the software and its developers, according to the Financial Times, although the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
SwiftKey is a keyboard app that leas your typing style and particular veacular to offer suggestions while you type. It's been around on Android phones and tablets since 2010 and on Apple's mobile devices since in 2014, when the company opened up access to third-party keyboards.
"Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our mission is to enhance interaction between people and technology," London-based founders Jon Reynolds and Ben Medlock wrote in a blog post. "We think these are a perfect match, and we believe joining Microsoft is the right next stage in our jouey."
The acquisition could give Microsoft a boost in the phone business, where the company largely missed the boat. But don't think this acquisition is just about competing to be the keyboard of choice on your smartphone.
"In this cloud-first, mobile-first world, SwiftKey's technology aligns with our vision for more personal computing experiences that anticipate our needs versus responding to our commands, and directly supports our ambition to reinvent productivity by leveraging the intelligent cloud," Microsoft's Executive Vice President of Technology and Research Harry Shum said in a blog post announcing the deal.
The acquisition is also about the artificial intelligence -- widely expected to be the next frontier of computing -- the app uses to predict users' word choices. Research in AI -- the ability of a machine, computer or system to exhibit humanlike intelligence -- has been dominated lately by large tech companies such as Google and Facebook.
The goal is to create machines that can perceive their environment and complete a wide array of everyday tasks previously performed by humans. While much has been made about intelligent robots, other AI applications include speech and handwriting recognition, fraud prevention, automatically generated email replies and self-driving cars like those under development by Google.
Microsoft has dabbled in AI before, most publicly with Cortana, the intelligent digital assistant found in its Windows 10 operating system. Like Apple's Siri and Google's own Google Now service, Cortana lets you interact with a device by talking to it. You can ask it to set reminders, to respond to text messages and to hear contextual information gleaned from emails and search results -- flight times, sports scores and news headlines, for example.
The Redmond, Washington-based company's Project Oxford artificial intelligence team has concocted emotion-reading technology that uses knowledge of facial expressions to identify specific human feelings conveyed in photos. The technology, on display at Microsoft's Future Decoded event in London in November, trains computers to recognize eight core emotional states: anger, contempt, fear, disgust, happiness, neutral, sadness and surprise.
Although many futurists envision a more human-beneficial application, some industry watchers, including SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, have grown conceed with how far AI can go and its potential dangers. In August 2014, Musk expressed fears that AI could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Even famed physicist Stephen Hawking has voiced reservations about AI.
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