With the AI arms race heating up, it’s no surprise that tech behemoths like Microsoft are refocusing their efforts on incorporating AI into all of their products. In February, Microsoft integrated Bing AI smarts into the Bing Mobile app and Skype, aiming to be the first tech titan to bring massive language models to the mainstream. To that end, the Bing chatbot is now being integrated into another Microsoft product, SwiftKey Beta.
Pedram Rezaei, Microsoft’s CTO of mobile and commerce, revealed on Twitter that the company has added a major AI functionality to SwiftKey Beta (via The Verge). The move significantly boosts the service, outshining the rest of the leading Android keyboard apps out there.
The feature is live on our devices, and users with access to Microsoft SwiftKey Beta on Android can now try the chatbot by tapping the Bing icon in the left corner of the app’s toolbar. Users should also be able to select different tones if they want to change the form of a sentence based on specific scenarios.
Once tapped, the new SwiftKey feature displays three tabs for “Search,” “Tone,” and “Chat.” The default tab is Bing Search, which was integrated into the keyboard app in 2018 to let you browse the web without having to open another app.
The fun starts when you switch to the Tone tab, where you can type any phrase or sentence in a text field right above the keys and rephrase them into various tones. All you need to do is tap the arrow button in the right corner, and the app will generate different styles of the sentence you created. There are four available tones, namely “Professional,” “Casual,” “Polite,” and “Social post.”
On the other hand, the Chat tab is quite similar to the chatbot experience within the Bing app. You’ll be greeted with the same landing screen, in which you can set the conversation style before asking Bing Chat anything. You can type a question into the AI-powered search engine, and it will return a detailed and up-to-date response, complete with citations from relevant sites listed below the answer.
The chatbot also has AI capabilities in the same vein as ChatGPT, allowing you to ask Bing Chat to write emails for you or create itineraries for specific destinations. It’s quite a major upgrade for a web browser that has previously been chastised for returning irrelevant search results.
Unfortunately for iOS users, the new SwiftKey feature is only available on Android for the time being. That said, it’s not unlikely for Microsoft to push the keyboard app’s new Bing Chat AI smarts to the iOS camp in the near future.
