After a day of rumors, Microsoft has now confirmed that it has acquired SwiftKey, the London-based company behind the popular predictive keyboard app of the same name.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but according to a Financial Times report yesterday, Microsoft was looking to pay in the region of $250 million for the startup.
Founded in 2008, SwiftKey developed a solid reputation on Android as a replacement keyboard app for phones and tablets.
To speed up typing, it learns your writing style over time and even predicts the next word before you’ve started typing it — this is partly based on historical patterns, but it also scans texts from other sources to “learn” popular sequences in which words are normally placed.