Swiftkey helps Stephen Hawking communicate

The virtual keyboard developers SwiftKey (available for all smartphones) recently revealed that they are working to assist one of the greatest scientists of our time, Stephen Hawking. Suffering from a neuromotor disease, the theoretical physicist, cosmologist, writer and speaker communicates through the use of small sensor. It is with him that the team uses the SwiftKey to make things easier.

The sensor is activated by a muscle in his face, and he uses it to type words and numbers on his keyboard. what the SwiftKey has done is to integrate its technology into the communication system and build a personal “language model” to help predict its words so that it would be faster and easier for the scientist.

To be able to do this, the team at SwiftKey digitized and studied all the books in the Professor Hawking, lectures, documents, even those that have not been released for public consumption, in order to understand how he thinks and writes and so that they can adapt the system's predictions and self-corrections. 

The team at Swiftkey believes that by working on projects like this, they can improve communication in a broader sense. The Showmetech team commends this effort to ease the tough life of genius.