SwiftKey announces the first neural network keyboard

The idea is to use a digital brain to be able to better understand the context of what you're writing, much like Google uses its neural network to understand context of spoken language. To start, SwiftKey says it will make better predictions than other keyboards, and eventually hopes to be able to be able to predict entire messages for you. 

How has SwiftKey built its neural network? By applying machine learning to everything that any of you have ever typed using a SwiftKey keyboard, of course. The way that SwiftKey makes the claim that this is the first neural network keyboard is because rather than massive servers doing the heavy lifting, SwiftKey says this is "the first time this type of language model technology has been engineered specifically to operate locally on a smartphone keyboard." 

As noted above, we've been using the keyboard for a few hours and the predictions do seem to be better than before. Presumably, it will only get better from here. 

As of right now, SwiftKey Neural Alpha is only available on Android. There's no word on if it will be coming to iOS. 

source: SwiftKey

download: SwiftKey Neural Alpha