continuous incursion of artificial intelligence in every application, service, and aspect of your life goes on. Microsoft’s popular SwiftKey Android keyboard app lets you type by swiping through letters on the screen to create words. Now, SwiftKey is getting a dose of chatbot to liven things up.
Microsoft released the AI-enhanced Bing chat bot in February. Since then, it’s caught up with other chatbot heavyweights, including Google’s Bard and OpenAI’s ChatGPT (which powers the Bing Chat backend). Since then, Microsoft has been eager to show off its chatbot by expanding its reach.
Those curious can download the beta version of SwiftKey for Android. The April 5th update makes the Bing chatbot available wherever you’re messaging. Users will see three tabs in SwiftKey: one for Bing search, one marked with Chat that lets you talk to the AI in Bing Chat, and one marked with the tone that reads your conversations and composes suggested responses with a similar emotional tone. Subtraction does not happen All at onceso if you installed the SwiftKey beta and don’t see the Bing Chat tabs, keep checking back.
It’s Android only, of course. Users of other operating systems can access Bing Chat through the Bing app or through a web browser.
This kind of AI makes sense on the app, since the point of SwiftKey is to discern the meaning you’re trying to come up with through swipes and gestures. Of course, it’s one thing to guess what word you mean and quite another to do the generative AI thing of making up the complete messages you can send. But wait, it’s AI texting. What could go wrong?
Read on for more tech consumer news.
Transfers Google Podcasts to YouTube Music
Google loves to bundle their services together. Messaging and video chatting services Meet and Duo were rolled into one confusing package last year. Prior to that, Google had integrated its dedicated Google Play Music service into YouTube Music.
Then, the podcasts make their way to YouTube Music. Discover 9to5Google adding a Podcasts tab to the YouTube Music app. It’s not confirmation that Google plans to ditch its mobile Podcasts app, but it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for the company to do so in the near future.
However, Google is clearly eager to take more action with podcasts. Perhaps syncing the Podcasts app with its YouTube app will also absorb some of the audience from the popular music and video platform. Even so, services like Spotify and Apple Music clearly have a good head start.
Kobo for writing
Rakuten, best known for its Kobo e-readers, which serve as replacements for Amazon’s Kindles, has a new tablet you can write on. Kobo Elipsa 2E has a 10.3-inch screen that allows you to read e-books and documents while writing notes with the supplied stylus.
At $400, the Elipsa is more expensive than its two main competitors, the ReMarkable 2 and Amazon’s Kindle Scribe. The Kindle Scribe may be a little later in the lineup than the ReMarkable, but it’s still a huge stepping stone in the E Ink court, thanks only to Amazon’s dominance in the e-reader and e-book market. Kobo has never shied away from remaining competitive and has consistently produced its high-quality hardware. They may not have the ubiquitousness of Amazon’s massive library and general ubiquitous presence, but you can always check out the library’s books about them.