Swiftkeys moonshot lab: Greenhouse has released another keyboard, this time based on an artificial neural network, which they say will improve word prediction.
While Swiftkey is acknowledged as having one of the better word prediction algorithims around, their existing n-gram technology is still limited and Swiftkey say that this new Neural Alpha keyboard can understand the context of what you’re saying rather than the method used by n-gram which relies on a bank of words built up from a common library as well as words you’ve taught it.
So how does it work? Well, the Neural model works by clustering words together from which the neural model can then use the context to suggest a word that hasn’t been used previously in the correct context. For example:Swiftkey describes (or visualises) it best:
having seen the phrase “Let’s meet at the airport” during training, the technology is able to infer that “office” or “hotel” are similar words which could also be appropriate predictions in place of “airport”. Further, it understands that “Let’s meet at the airport” has a similar sentence structure to “Let’s chat at the office”. This intelligence allows SwiftKey Neural to offer the most appropriate word based on the sentence being typed.
It sounds exciting, and if you want to try it out you can. The Neural Alpha keyboard is available to try on Google Play right now.
So far so good! My accuracy with Flow on the original SwiftKey was incredibly frustrating. Still looking for an Android keyboard with good accuracy! Otherwise, I’d love to get my hands on a Blackberry with Android if only for the physical keyboard! Haha.
Wonder if they can port it to windows phone which has a terrible key board..