Tokyo (SCCIJ) – The smartphone keyboard of the Swiss artificial intelligence start-up Typewise has won the innovation award at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas for a second consecutive year. Its enlarged keys are arranged in a honeycomb pattern. As a result, users make fewer accidental typing mistakes. Typewise based in Binningen in the canton of Basel is now preparing new applications of the language processing software behind the keyboard.
The upgraded Typewise AI keyboard wins a second CES Innovation Award (© Typewise).
High demand
Typewise attended the electronics fair in Las Vegas as part of the SwissTech pavilion. Following an upgrade of the keyboard’s capabilities in the middle of last year, the product again impressed the judges of the CES Innovation Awards program in the Software & Mobile Apps product category.
Typewise CEO and Co-founder David Eberle said: “The CES Innovation Awards are a highly respected mark of technological prowess.” After the first award in 2021, the Typewise application has been downloaded more than 1.7 million times from the Android and iPhone app stores. The fourth app version with further enhancements will be published soon.
Text prediction
Moreover, the company is preparing the launch of a text prediction engine for desktop computers. The same core software as in the smartphone keyboard aims to enable enterprises and individuals to ‘fast-forward’ their writing and compose higher-quality emails, messages, and documents.
With the help of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural-language processing, the Swiss text prediction engine corrects and completes words and entire sentences. It runs on-device with no contact to cloud-based engines like current keyboards with text prediction, thus enabling higher privacy. The model also uses significantly less energy than comparable solutions.
Current manual interaction with digital devices happens only at 10 percent of the speed of human thoughts. Given that people spend more than 6.5 hours on their digital devices every day, the result is a massive loss of productivity. “We will boost the average person’s productivity by two to three times over the coming years,” promises Eberle.
Funding sources
Typewise collaborates with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich’s AI Center to develop its advanced, on-device algorithms. Innosuisse, Switzerland’s federal innovation agency, is funding this collaboration. The keyboard app can be downloaded for free. The Typewise Pro version with more functionality costs 2 euros per month or 10 euros per year. A version working offline requires a one-time payment of 25 euros.
The two start-up founders met in school where they developed their first tech products – a school library database and a music categorization AI. After leaving university they launched a successful funding campaign for the prototype of the keyboard app. During a seed round mid-2020 raising $1 million, the Typewise founders appeared on the Swiss venture capital television show “The Lion’s Den” and won two investors for their endeavor.
Text: SCCIJ partly with material of Typewise
