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SwiftKey for Android is now powered by a neural network
From today, the popular keyboard app SwiftKey will be powered by a neural network. The latest version of the app combines the features of its Neural Alpha, released last October, and its regular app in order to serve better predictions. It's the first major change to the main SwiftKey app since Microsoft acquired the London-based company earlier this year. Understanding why the new SwiftKey is going to be better than what came before it requires a little effort, but the real-world benefits are definitely tangible. See, the regular SwiftKey app has, since its inception, used a probability-based language algorithm based on the "n-gram" model for predictions. At its core, the system read the last two words you've written, checked them against a large database and picked three words it thought might come next, in order of probability. That two-word constraint is a serious problem for predicting what a user is trying to say. If I were to ask you to guess the word that comes after the fragment "It might take a," the first suggestion you come up with is unlikely to be "look." But with a two-word prediction engine, it's only looking at "take a," and "look" is the first suggestion. There had to be a better solution. Simply upping the number of words it looks at is impractical -- the database grows exponentially with every word you add -- so SwiftKey's initial solution was to boost its n-gram engine with less fallible, personalized data. If you regularly use phrases, SwiftKey uses that data to improve predictions. And you could also link social media and Gmail accounts for better predictions.
