Interview & Recap:

Intelligent Communication

UCLU Leading Women

Published in

Leading Women

9 min readJun 7, 2015

with SwiftKey

Consumer-focused AI with three of SwiftKey’s Leading Women

On Tech Night, we were very privileged to welcome SwiftKey’s Ben Medlock (CTO & Co-Founder) to introduce the evening, and convince us that life in Tech is exciting and fun.

He told us his story of building SwiftKey straight out of university. And on top of sharing some invaluable advice (e.g. #1 Top Tip of all time for all aspiring startup builders— never give up), he shared some really cool facts about SwiftKey and their work with Intel on Stephen Hawking’s communication system.

Fun Fact: Did you know that the total amount of time that SwiftKey has saved its users so far is equivalent to watching the entire series of Friends 19 million times?

No you did not…

Along with Ben were two lovely people who joined our startup panel — Caroline Gasperin (Team Lead for Languages) and Chetan Padia (Senior Software Engineer at the time).

Olivia Nash (Connect & Lloyd’s), Jennifer Langdon (Skimlinks), Dr Caroline Gasperin (SwiftKey), and Clarice Hilton (CodeFirst: Girls) on our Startup Panel

Today, we have an interview with three leading women of SwiftKey to find out more about what they do, and how SwiftKey makes the world’s smartest keyboard; intelligently making communication easy for free!

We hope that their stories inspire you, and that you are able to gain a greater understanding of different roles in technology, startup life and business strategy.

More about SwiftKey

Not only is SwiftKey currently one of the most downloaded apps across both Android and iOS platforms, but they were also named Wired’s No.1 Hottest Startup in London in 2014, and have been named PR Week UK’s Best Places to Work for two years running.

SwiftKey predicts your emojis too! (GIF courtesy of SwiftKey)

They caught on to Big Data and Machine Learning waves way before these became trendy and strategically entered the Android market before its exponential growth. I particularly admire how the company strategically broke into the mainstream market at a time when accelerators were less prevalent, and their focus on a personal touch and community.

Interviewees

Dr Caroline Gasperin is the Team Lead for Languages at SwiftKey. She studied BSc & MSc Computer Science in Brazil, and then graduated from Cambridge with a PhD in Computer Science.

Dr Charlie Edmunds is the Head of Insight at SwiftKey. She studied BA & MA Natural Sciences, particularly Genetics, in Cambridge and graduated with a PhD in Molecular Biology.

Ruth Barnett is the VP of Global Communications at SwiftKey and a former Sky News journalist (political reporter, online journalist and technology producer). She trained as a journalist at City University London, and graduated from Cambridge with a degree in Social and Political Sciences.

Interview

Describe your role at SwiftKey and your work:

Charlie: I work with the aggregate data we get back from our users and market data to help all areas of the business to make good decisions.

Ruth: I run the Comms team which means I help explain SwiftKey’s products and business to the media and wider community.

Caroline: I lead SwiftKey’s languages team. We build ‘language models’ for each language SwiftKey supports, such as French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese — SwiftKey’s apps understand the way words fit together and their context. Our Android keyboard now supports more than 80 languages and we’re improving our support for iPhone too.

What’s your favourite thing about working at SwiftKey?

Charlie: Right now, my favourite thing is finally (after 2 years of keeping it confidential) being able to say that we worked on Stephen Hawking’s communication system, along with our partners, Intel.

The SwiftKey team provided the next-word predictions and autocorrection for the system he uses to write and speak.

Ruth: The people. We’ve got a whole mix here — people who are leaders in their fields with PhDs in Artificial Intelligence, people who are fluent in multiple languages, people who are great fun to work with.

For example — last week was ‘Innovation Week’, a five-day internal hackathon where we all stopped our day jobs to try new things. I worked with two Android engineers and learnt some completely new things.

Caroline: The potential behind our technology continues to excite me. Our predictive models and language expertise can go a long way and we continuously explore applications that can benefit from it.

Is your role today what you expected it to entail when you joined the company?

With respect to this, what’s the best surprise you’ve had so far?

Charlie: When I joined I’m not sure I knew exactly what I expected — there were no more than about 25 of us and I was thrown straight into “getting things done”. If it didn’t require coding I did it: analytics, support, co-ordinating releases on the app store, writing blogs and sending tweets…

Now I have much more time to focus on analytics, but having been involved in so many areas really helps me to understand what people want and what they need when they come to me asking for numbers.

Ruth: I joined from a completely different environment - a TV news studio! The best surprise for me has been the surge in popularity for the product. SwiftKey’s keyboard technology is now on more than 250 million devices worldwide, not bad for a UK startup.

What’s the most exciting project you’ve worked on in the company?

Or the biggest obstacle you’ve overcome in your work?

Ruth: I loved working on our SwiftKey for iPhone launch last September. Apple launching iOS8 was a big deal for us as it allowed third-party keyboard apps for the first time. They announced this in the summer and we only had till the Autumn to build it — it was a brilliant race against time to produce a brilliant app and launch it.

The team really came together, on launch day we had everyone in the same room, from the technical team leads to PR to IT. Within 24 hours it had been downloaded more than 1m times and hit No 1 in the US and UK charts. An amazing feeling.

Caroline: One interesting obstacle for the Languages Team is profanity — how to make sure our apps don’t predict strings of offensive words to our users. Our language models are made by scraping the words on the web — and clearly there’s some offensive content out there too.

We wanted to make sure that when someone writes a word, it doesn’t then predict a highly offensive racial, sexual or other slur. It is easy enough to write a list of offensive words in English, but that gets harder when we’re dealing with languages the team might not speak.

Also — context is everything, the same word can mean very different things depending on how it’s used. I helped develop an automated way for detecting swear words in new languages and that was a really fun project!

How does SwiftKey integrate multiple languages in one keyboard?

What influenced SwiftKey’s decision to make this possible?

Ruth: SwiftKey has a very international team so we’ve always known that for many bilingual or trilingual people, typing on smartphones can be a real pain. You need to switch between apps or different settings. We wanted to change that.

SwiftKey Keyboard for Android now supports more than 80 languages and you can download up to three at any one time — so this means you can just type and the predictions will adjust. For example you could start a sentence in English, then write a French word and it’ll understand you now need autocorrect in French.

How important is analytics in shaping business intelligence?

How does SwiftKey tailor this into iterations?

Ruth: Analytics is really important — that’s how we understand how well our apps are working, how many people are using them and more.

Why is it so important for a company to engage consumers directly?

How does SwiftKey do this efficiently?

Ruth: Making a consumer app is all about the customer - it’s vital we listen to our users! SwiftKey is a very grassroots company, we’ve grown thanks to word of mouth and having our users recommend us to their friends, this is really important to us.

There are lots of ways to get involved — follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Google+ and join in the discussion with our Community Team. Or go one further and join the VIP Community (vip.swiftkey.com) — this means you get notified about new betas and features to test.

Caroline: We also invite the community to help test languages for us before they are released — this feedback is really valuable and people seem to enjoy helping make the language support in the keyboard better.

From what we hear about working at SwiftKey, there’s a lot of fun stuff to do in the office…

What’s your favourite thing to do there when you’re not working?

Charlie: I’m terrible at table-tennis so it’s definitely not that! I like the knowledge-sharing that goes on, with both internal and external speakers.

In the past month we’ve had an Art Night, where we got to play around with paints and pencils with some help from the much-artier Design Team, and had an author read us an extract from her book (in which the protagonist is a young, single entrepreneur looking for love!).

Caroline: Learning languages is fun too. Once a week we have a Spanish lunch where we can chat and practise Spanish, and also an English lunch when non-native speakers like me can perfect our pronunciation.

Ruth: Fun is actually officially one of our six company values, so it’s very much part of our culture! There’s a lot of emphasis on social events, Innovation Days (our version of hack days), team bonding, we have lunch together every Wednesday and beers and food to celebrate the of the week on Friday.

What’s one piece of advice you can give to anyone who’s looking to work in a fast-growing startup?

Charlie: If you are working in a startup don’t expect to just do “your job” — expect to do anything and everything that needs doing. You may be surprised what you end up liking and being good at.

Ruth: Take the opportunity to learn and get stuck in. Bigger companies can be more hierarchical with more defined roles — a startup is a chance to learn from absolutely everyone and get lots of responsibility, even early in your career. Go for it!

Thank you Caroline, Charlie and Ruth for your time, it was a pleasure to interview you.

We were delighted and privileged to have been joined by such an innovative company for Tech Week, and hope to continue to see more of SwiftKey at UCL. We know you’ve been waiting for us to say this — tech is not just a boy’s game!