SwiftKey Gets Bing-Powered GIF Search Support

SwiftKey on Thursday introduced Bing-powered GIF search support to its main app in India. As GIF images have now become an integral part of our communications and often create amusing chats, it is good to see that SwifKey is trying to add support for relevant GIFs to its keyboard app.

In order to incorporate the GIF support inside the app, Microsoft-owned SwiftKey is taking help from the Bing search engine and the company says that the provided GIFs will be optimised for the conversations.

Sarab Singh, India Country Manager, commented on the update by saying, "By introducing GIF support we are hoping to further enhance how our users communicate. GIFs' ease of creation, their animation and iconic loop capabilities means they're a great fit for capturing and conveying cultural memes as well as personal sentiment and reactions. They create innovative new ways for users to express themselves, which is why they've become so ubiquitous in online conversations."

In its blog post, SwiftKey said that the company is continuously working towards improving the product for the Indian users. To recall, SwiftKey for Android received basic GIF support back in June, with search limited to categories. The company also introduced support for transliteration of languages: Bangla, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, and Telugu.

Thanks to transliteration, the users of supported languages can use SwiftKey to type in their native language by spelling words out phonetically in English.