The agreement was announced on February 3rd and reported by Forbes’s Parmy Olsen:
Microsoft is boosting to its efforts in artificial intelligence by acquiring SwiftKey, a British startup that makes a popular predictive typing app as well as the language software that powers the computer on Stephen Hawking’s wheelchair.
Microsoft is paying $250 million for SwiftKey two years after Facebook also tried to buy the startup, according to sources with knowledge of the matter.
Microsoft has stated that the public facing part of SwiftKey – the predictive keyboard beloved by millions of users – will remain, although I would expect the technology to find itself applied to Microsoft’s Word Flow keyboard in the near future. Given the precedent set when Accompli was purchased and rebranded as a mobile version of Outlook, it may be that SwiftKey and Word Flow merge into one app with the latter’s name.
The real prize for Microsoft is likely to be the predictive technology that lies behind SwiftKey. With natural language input becoming more prevalent, and the rise in speech-powered assistants such as Microsoft’s Cortana, the knowledge that SwiftKey as a company has gathered in parsing language will help drive new products. It’s expected that the new Microsoft employees will work under the Technology and Research Group, and not the mobile applications development team.
Forbes