Samsung phone owners can now get Microsoft’s Bing AI chatbot on their keyboard thanks to an update to the Swiftkey Beta app.
With it, you can consult OpenAI’s most powerful AI assistant, GPT-4, on a range of apps and services, from email through social media to WhatsApp.
Swiftkey replaces the virtual keyboard on phones and tablets. This means Bing Chat will be only a shortcut tap away whenever you need to write a message on your phone.
For now, Samsung owners can access the bot by downloading the Microsoft Swiftkey Beta app from the Google Play Store.
As its name implies, this isn’t the main version of the app, but its experimental sibling that gives you access to new features before they’re released to the wider public.
Microsoft originally debuted the AI chatbot on Swiftkey earlier this month, but it wasn’t available on all phones.
Bing boasts three major features on Swiftkey: Chat, Tone, and Search. The three functionalities allow you to summon the bot to help with things such as crafting a flirty Tinder message (chat); making a work email sound more professional (tone); or checking the weather (search).
As it is built into the keyboard, you no longer need to leave an app to consult ChatGPT or Bing Chat on their respective websites. Who cares if you’re accused of being unoriginal — sometimes even the smartest person in the room needs some inspiration.
How to download the Swiftkey keyboard with Bing AI
If you already have Swiftkey, or Swifkey Beta, installed on your phone, you can use Bing by pressing the dedicated icon at the top right of the keyboard. Firstly, though, you should head to your phone’s app store to check for an update to the Swiftkey app.
Those who don’t have the app will need to install it from the App Store or Google Play. The app guides you through the process of replacing your phone’s default keyboard with the Microsoft alternative.
Some of the warnings from your phone may sound quite imposing; a malicious keyboard app could collect your input and, for example, steal your bank details. However, we think you can trust Swiftkey as much as your phone’s baked-in one. It was one of the most popular phone keyboards years before it was acquired by Microsoft in 2016.
An account sign-in from Microsoft will be required, too.
How does Bing Chat work?
Bing Chat uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 artificial intelligence tech. This follows a $10 billion (£8bn) investment in the company by Microsoft, announced in January 2023. Outside of Bing, GPT-4 is available to only paying users signed up to the ChatGPT Plus service.
Microsoft has been a long-term investor in the AI firm. It invested $1bn (£800 million) in 2019. It also pumped in an additional $2bn (£1.6bn) between 2019 and 2023, according to the New York Times.
OpenAI has its own GPT-4-based chatbot, the famous ChatGPT. It also developed the DALL-E image-generation AI, which creates pictures based on text input.
