Tokyo (SCCIJ) – The smartphone keyboard of the Swiss artificial intelligence start-up Typewise has won the innovation award at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas for a second consecutive year. Its enlarged keys are arranged in a honeycomb pattern. As a result, users make fewer accidental typing mistakes. Typewise based in Binningen in the canton of Basel is now preparing new applications of the language processing software behind the keyboard. The upgraded Typewise AI keyboard wins a second CES Innovation Award ( Typewise).

Smart speakers like Google Home and Amazon Alexa could be used by criminals to listen to and decipher a password or PIN being typed in on a nearby phone. Researchers from the University of Cambridge built their own version of a smart speaker to closely resemble those which are commercially available. Sound recordings from the gadget were inputted into a computer for analysis and experts investigated if the sound and vibrations caused by typing on a smartphone screen could be used to guess a five-digit passcode. When the phone was placed within 20cm (7.8inches) of the custom-built device, the computer was able to guess the code with 76 per cent accuracy in three attempts. This graphic outlines the general flow of the experiment.

Five years of owning smartphones has conditioned my thumbs to navigate tiny virtual keyboards with speed and precision. I imagine many feel the same way, given smartphone owners worldwide are spending between 50 and 200 minutes every week using messaging apps. Yet an increasing number of voice dictation apps are making it easier than ever to communicate not with our thumbs, but with our voices. The latest example of such an app is TalkType, an Android keyboard created by Baidu Research and launching Monday. What separates TalkType from the myriad other smartphone keyboards out there is that its users aren't greeted with a QWERTY typing pad, but rather a round microphone icon.

Toves goes on, "Since its launch last fall, the Android-only smartphone keyboard has put AI in the pockets of hundreds of thousands of users. SwiftKey Neural Alpha represents a trend in technology to shift AI away from bulky supercomputers like IBM's Watson or the U.S. Government's Titan. 'Until now, neural network language models have been deployed mostly on large servers, requiring significant computational resources,' the SwiftKey Team said. 'The launch of SwiftKey Neural Alpha is a breakthrough as it marks the first time this type of language model technology has been engineered specifically to operate locally on a smartphone keyboard'."

When most people think of artificial intelligence, they think of Cylons, or Terminators, or HAL--sentient robots who turn on their masters in an effort to destroy the human race. But companies like SwiftKey, who are making helpful, smartphone-compatible artificial intelligence apps, are trying to change that. SwiftKey Neural Alpha is the world's first artificially intelligent smartphone keyboard. The keyboard uses machine learning to help predict what words the user is likely to enter by understanding the way the user puts sentences together. "Human language itself is a pattern," said Michael Smith, VP of Product at SwiftKey.