Microsoft is putting its Bing AI chatbot into another one of its products, this time being the popular keyboard app, SwiftKey. Of course, this isn’t much of a surprise given that the company already said that would be adding its AI to more of its products aside from just the search engine, like the Edge browser and Skype.
The AI integration into SwiftKey was confirmed by Microsoft’s CTO of mobile and commerce, Pedram Rezaei, who said that the feature would be “slowly rolling out“. To that end, those who are interested in trying it out must download the beta version of SwiftKey from the Google Play Store.
There isn’t much change to the keyboard accept a very noticeable Bing chatbot icon in the left corner. When you click on it, you’ll see three options: search, tone, and chat.
The search function is just a tiny search bar that will pull up the best information it can from your query as well as images related to it. As for the tone function, you can input any sentence into it and it will suggest several alternatives with different tones, such as professional or polite. And with chat, it is essentially the same chatbot you can find on bing, where you can interact with it and ask it any question.
As of now, there is no word on whether the AI integration will be coming to the iOS version of SwiftKey. Last year, Microsoft discontinued support for the keyboard on iOS after months of not updating it, but it decided to bring it back to the platform in November.
Rezaei said at the time that the company would be “investing heavily” in the keyboard, so there’s a good chance that the iOS version will also get the AI integration once a stable rollout comes around for Android. That being said, it’s unclear how long the feature will stay in beta.
