SELWYN
Trevor Ray Hart
Left: Jon Reynolds, co-founder of SwiftKey in his London office.
work effortlessly. Not only do we use this technology to power our smartphone app, but we share it with a handful of companies. Take Samsung, who use SwiftKey to improve the keyboard on their touchscreen devices, or Intel, who we collaborated with on Hawking’s new speech system.
The predictable type Founded by Selwynites Jon Reynolds (above) and Joe Braidwood (both se 2004), SwiftKey is regarded as one of the leading technology start-ups in Europe, having changed how over half a billion people type. We speak to Joe about the predictive keyboard phenomenon that counts both Stephen Fry and Professor Stephen Hawking as avid users. 18 Selwyn Issue 22 Autumn 2015
So what exactly is SwiftKey? Primarily, SwiftKey is an app that upgrades the default keyboard on your smartphone’s touchscreen with one that’s more intuitive and intelligent. It pays attention to the words and phrases you use over time and does a better job at usefully predicting them when you type. The result is that you spend less time fussing over typos and more time being able to express yourself. Sounds simple, except it’s not. Predicting language in a way that’s tailored to each of our users individually is far from trivial. So when we talk about SwiftKey, we’re also referring to all of the complex technology that makes our keyboard
So what’s the Selwyn connection? It was Graduands’ Week and I had just finished studying law. Everyone at College was being sentimental about leaving and I ended up chatting to fellow C-staircase resident Jon Reynolds (se 2004), who had decided to finish his Nat-Sci studies after three years to take up a job in the Civil Service. We were both eager for a new challenge, and agreed to stay in touch. We joked that we had mutual respect for each other and, one day, should team up to do something a bit risky and disruptive. A couple of years later, that moment happened. Jon and I bumped into each other at a reunion of College friends in a Hammersmith pub. Whilst working in the Civil Service, Jon had noticed a growing number of his colleagues were struggling to type on what appeared to be smartphones with ‘shrinking typewriters’. Jon was convinced we could do better. He started to investigate whether using two branches of artificial intelligence – machine learning and natural language processing – would give better results on smartphones, especially as they seemed to rapidly be getting much more powerful. He had enlisted the support of another friend from Cambridge, Dr. Ben Medlock, who held a PhD in artificial intelligence from Fitz. At the pub, Jon pulled an iPhone out of his pocket and showed me the first prototype. I saw great promise. “Let me know if I can help. We should team up and make this famous,” I said. Soon after, I joined Jon (CEO) and Ben (CTO) as the “marketing guy”, alongside my day job as a journalist at Sky News. And in 2010, after we raised our inaugural round of seed capital, I became one of the company’s first employees. Today, we have a team of over 150 people with offices in London, San Francisco, Seoul, Hong Kong and New Delhi. We also call five Selwynites staff – the others being Joe Osborne (se 2004), Chris Carr (se 2004) and, until recently, Alex Nixon (se 2004).