Microsoft is trying to give Bing a boost with artificial intelligence and the use of chatbots. The company knows that to enhance this it has to take the feature beyond the search engine itself, which despite the increase in the number of users is still far behind the ubiquitous Google, so it has made the decision to Bring Bing Chatbot to SwiftKeyits popular keyboard app that is mostly active in development on Android.
The Bing chatbot integration in was introduced yesterday in the beta channel of the Android version of SwiftKey. At the feature level, it includes the chat mode that gives access to the chatbot or a tone mode that rewrites any text on the keyboard. In case the user was using the Bing mobile application to access the chatbot, its integration in SwiftKey makes said application redundant, although for this one would have to be willing to use the virtual keyboard in a general way.
The Bing chatbot integration with SwitKey is currently exclusive to the Android build of the app. Pedram Rezaei, director of mobile technology and commerce at Microsoft, has acknowledged that the feature is being slowly rolled out in the beta channel of the aforementioned version, but for now there is no news about its possible arrival on iOSas the build for that system has had a somewhat erratic trajectory in recent times in which it has been discontinued and reinstated from Apple’s App Store.
Although development of SwiftKey for iOS has less continuity than for Android, Rezaei has commented that Microsoft is “investing heavily in the keyboard”, so a possible acceleration of development of the build targeting Apple’s mobile operating system cannot be ruled out entirely. On the other hand, this may be another move to push for an AI-powered version of Bing for good.
SwiftKey is not a development originally from Microsoft, but rather a third-party keyboard that was acquired by the Redmond giant in 2016. Under the umbrella of the Redmond-based corporation, SwiftKey has remained one of the leading and more popular third-party keyboards. Now that artificial intelligence has become mainstream as a result of ChatGPT, it possibly has its great opportunity together with Bing to expand and gain users.
