In what could be one of the more interesting buys in recent times, Microsoft Corp. is reported to have acquired SwiftKey (TouchType Ltd.) the maker of a predictive keyboard for iOS and Android devices.

The Financial Times quotes the proverbial “people familiar with the deal” as saying the price of the acquisition was around $250 million.

Founded in 2008, SwiftKey aims to “enhance the interaction between people and technology,” through its flagship app that adapts to the way people type, allowing them to spend less time correcting their typos and more time saying what they actually want to say.

The company uses artificially intelligent predictive technology that learns from a users writing style, and is advertised as getting smarter over time, predicting individual phrases that are specific to the user.

“We believe technology should adapt to you and not the other way around, and we’re committed to providing our users with the world’s most intuitive and personalized keyboard software,” the company notes.

SwiftKey users are said to have saved nearly two trillion keystrokes and more than 23,000 years in combined typing time, and is installed on 300 million mobile devices across 89 languages.

AI buy?

While Microsoft has fundamentally shifted its mobile focus from Windows Phone alone to one where it wants to offer services on as many devices as possible irrespective of the operating system, buying a company that offers essentially a smart keyboard doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you dig deeper into the technology behind it, and that quite possibly makes in an artificial intelligence buy.

According to The Verge, SwiftKey recently launched an Android keyboard that uses a neural network instead of standard algorithms when predicting words, and that research is said to be able to be applied to a lot more than keyboards.

While artificial neural networks are not a new concept, they potentially have the ability to estimate or approximate a staggering number functions that depend on a large number of inputs in a very short time frame, and while we can’t speak for just how well SwiftKey’s technology has gone along that path, if Microsoft thought it might be something they could use as part of the ongoing battle to develop more and improved AI systems, it would certainly make the deal that much more understandable.

Prior to acquisition SwiftKey had raised $21.59 million over four rounds from investors including Accel Partners, Index Ventures, and Octopus Investments.

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