SwiftKey's company blog covers its predictive keyboard for Android and iOS, including its use by Stephen Hawking and its Clojure-based engineering.
HN commenters cite it for how SwiftKey powers Stephen Hawking's communication system, while others debate privacy of keyboard apps and the opt-in cloud feature.
The space for AI-powered venture-backed companies is really booming.
Full list of companies mentioned in the article:
Enigma - http://enigma.io/
Sift Science - https://siftscience.com/
Ravelin - https://ravelin.com/
H2O.ai - http://h2o.ai/
Seldon - http://www.seldon.io/
SigOpt - https://sigopt.com/
Gluru - https://gluru.co/
x.ai - https://x.ai/
SwiftKey - https://swiftkey.com/en
Matternet - https://mttr.net/
SkyCatch - https://www.skycatch.com/
DeepMind - http://www.deepmind.com/
Vicarious - http://www.vicarious.com/
Scaled Inference - https://scaledinference.com/
Sentient Technologies - http://www.sentient.ai/
MetaMind - https://www.metamind.io/
Unbabel - https://unbabel.com/
Ravelin - https://ravelin.com/
Signal - http://signalmedia.co/
Sano - http://www.sano.co/
Deep Genomics - http://www.deepgenomics.com/
Atomwise - http://www.atomwise.com/
Flatiron Health - http://www.flatiron.com/
Enlitic - http://www.enlitic.com/
Zebra Medical - https://www.zebra-med.com/
DueDil - https://www.duedil.com/
Premise - http://www.premise.com/
By default, iOS keyboards cannot interact with other parts of the app/their container app, and cannot send information over the network. [1][2][3]
If you do enable full access, then yep, anything is fair game. But that's a tradeoff users can make.
[1] - https://twitter.com/SwiftKey/status/514540356918972416
[2] - http://swiftkey.com/en/blog/swiftkey-require-full-access/
[3] - https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/General/Conceptual/ExtensibilityPG/Keyboard.html
Hi there,
You can actually turn off notifications from the app by:
1) SK settings
2) Advanced
3) Uncheck the box
SwiftKey has also stated they are working on performance updates in the next release: http://swiftkey.com/en/blog/swiftkey-5-performance/
As far as the notification at the top of the screen this is a notification provided by the Android OS and cannot be turned off or hidden.
Cheers,
Ryan
Community Manager @ SwiftKey
Hi, thanks for the feedback. SwiftKey Cloud is a secure, opt-in service that allows you to safely backup your language data and sync it across your devices. We take your data security seriously and you can read how we keep your data safe here: http://swiftkey.com/en/data-security/
Fun fact: the latest version of this software uses SwiftKey under the hood - http://swiftkey.com/en/blog/swiftkey-reveals-role-professor-stephen-hawkings-communication-system/ (Disclaimer: I used to work for SwiftKey)
When you turn them on, Android will even warn you of that possibility. SwiftKey has some sort of cloud (opt-in) feature[1] so it's a keylogger with benefits.
[1] http://swiftkey.com/en/more-about-cloud/