Microsoft's SwiftKey, which is one of the pre-loaded keyboard options for Galaxy smartphones and tablets, recently received an update. And in its wake, Microsoft appears to have completely disabled the SwiftKey support forums.
The recent SwiftKey update added a button for Bing AI, which is Microsoft's response to ChatGPT. This new button offers access to the Bing chatbot, which Microsoft says “can find answers from the web, provide tone suggestions, and chat.”
A user on the social media platform Mastodon noticed that roughly at the same time as Microsoft rolled out the Bing AI SwiftKey update, the company deleted its public support forums for SwiftKey.
Coincidence or some grand conspiracy?
The social media user concluded that Microsoft must've removed the support forums once it got this Bing AI update out to avoid backlash from the SwiftKey userbase about the addition of this new Bing AI button and functionality — even though some users could welcome the feature, while others have probably ignored it.
That may or may not be true. But what is true is that many people react rigidly to change, and there's always a possibility that Microsoft didn't want to deal with a flood of complaints for a feature it really wants to add to its SwiftKey keyboard as part of its apparent strategy to compete with ChatGPT. Evidently, Microsoft wants its Bing AI to be as widely accessible as possible and beat the popularity contest against ChatGPT and other conversational AIs. Adding this feature to SwiftKey should give Bing wider exposure.
Whether or not that means the company is doing wrong by SwiftKey users is probably debatable somewhere in some corners of the internet. But the Bing AI feature shouldn't read the user's inputs at all times, and besides, many people will probably love the idea of having a conversational AI at their fingertips.
