One man builds 48 of SwiftKey's over 150 language models supported by the Android keyboard app

Perhaps many won't be surprised to learn that SwiftKey now features support for more than 150 languages, but you know what's really impressive? Apparently, one man is responsible for building 48 of SwiftKey's over 150 language models.

His name is Julien Baley, a SwiftKey engineer who speaks fluently English, French and Mandarin. He also has varying degrees of knowledge of other languages like German, Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Breton, Armenian, Greek, Hungarian, Taiwanese, Classical Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Swahili, Scottish Gaelic, Yiddish, and Yakut.

The first language he built for SwiftKey took about four months, but today, Julien managed to smoother the process to two weeks … for ten language models!

In order to create a new language model for SwiftKey, you need at least 5,000 words. However, the language model becomes better and more accurate once it gains users, which also translates in larger vocabulary.

According to Julien, his most treasured language model built for SwiftKey is Kurdish. If you wonder why, here is his explanation: