Popular keyboard app SwiftKey has turned Shakespearean in honor of the bard’s 400th death anniversary this month by launching a new app. Dubbed ShakeSpeak, the tool uses predictive technology to insert old-timey Elizabethan phrases and lines inspired by his work into your texts.
SwiftKey seems to done its homework with ShakeSpeak, claiming that it’s analyzed Shakespeare’s complete works including The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Tempest, Macbeth and Twelfth Night. Bookworms who start typing out any of his famous sentences like ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’ or ‘to be or not to be’ are supposed to be automatically greeted with words to complete the phrases.
Like SwiftKey, ShakeSpeak too learns to predict sentences the more you use it. In a blog post, the company encourages users to start their sentences with ‘What ho!’ or ‘Ha!’ for an authentic Shakespearean experience. Same goes for thou, thee and thy which are apparently among the top words he utilized as compared to a modern English speaker.
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ShakeSpeak comes across as a fun quirky little tool for Shakespeare nerds looking to inject some 16th century dialogue into their regular old messages and who have always wanted to text like the bard himself. It’s been launched as part of a tourism campaign for the city of London under SwiftKey Greenhouse, the brand’s ideas lab.
Notably, ShakeSpeak’s release comes 2 months after SwiftKey was taken over by Microsoft. It’s pretty innovative in its own right, showing off how far the brand’s advanced machine learning abilities have come since it was set up in 2008. It could even be a hint at a more experimental direction for the firm in the future.
SwiftKey has only made ShakeSpeak accessible to Android users as of now. You can download it via the Google Play Store.