Microsoft's artificial intelligence push is all about saving you time

Remember when you first used T9 predictive text for text messaging on your cellphone, before internet-enabled smartphones? It completed sentences for you, and was often (not always) correct. T9 gave way to auto-correct (a function both convenient and, at times, enraging).

For many Android users, auto-correct has now given way to smarter, third-party typing clients like SwiftKey, a keyboard app that Microsoft bought this year for $250 million.

SwiftKey lets you drag your finger along the keys to type, and uses real-time prediction so you rarely have to finish a word. SwiftKey has more than 300 million users.

At Microsoft’s (MSFT) Ignite conference on Monday, CEO Satya Nadella shared an anecdote about SwiftKey to make a much larger point about applying artificial intelligence (AI) in the company’s applications.

Eventually, Nadella said, “Every one of us will have a neural net that learns on how we type, so that means it goes beyond the previous three words or four words that we entered, it goes beyond that to the semantic meaning of what we are trying to communicate. So it’s no longer that a keyboard is attached to a device — the keyboard is attached to you.”

SwiftKey, Nadella says, “has saved people something like 100,000 years of keyboard entry time.”

It’s a staggering figure. And Nadella added another to it: MileIQ, another third-party app (this one is for logging miles on a work trip for corporate reimbursement), “has returned $1.2 billion to the users of MileIQ.”

One app has saved people hours, the other dollars. Together, it gets to what Microsoft aims to do with artificial intelligence: save customers time and money. It’s about convenience, and efficiency.

Nadella verbalized it in loftier terms: “to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”

Now Microsoft is applying these tools and lessons in its Office 365 suite of organizational tools. But it remains to be seen whether predictive learning and other goodies can help Microsoft in its ongoing competition with Google’s cloud-based work tools.

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Daniel Roberts is a writer at Yahoo Finance, covering sports business and technology. Follow him on Twitter at @readDanwrite.

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