Nuance Purchases Swype for $100 Million

[Phillip Swanson]

Friday night news broke that Nuance acquired Swype—the company behind the popular Swype keyboard—for nearly $100 million. Speculation surrounding the reasoning and details of the move ran rampant. In an interview with TechCrunch Swype CEO Mike McSherry revealed some details.

The deal between Nuance—the company behind Apple’s latest voice recognition tech—and Swype cost Nuance $102.5 million split up into a $77.5 million payment up front and another $25 million after 18 months. But, the financials aren’t the real meat of the deal.

The broadest vision is we want to be the input for every single stream. You talk to your refrigerator and in-car navigation, you want your language models to follow you around. — McSherry

The acquisition of Swype now positions Nuance in the mobile market as a premier provider of input technologies (outside of simple keys) for devices. Nuance owns T9, their own voice recognition technology, and now Swype, which will be merged with T9 (Swype's co-founder Cliff Kushler invented T9).

The end game now for the newly partnered companies is a cloud-based input technology that shares a back-end providing users with a seamless experience across tactile or voice information entry on their phones. According to McSherry this means user’s will each have a personalized experience using their phones as Nuance and Swypes technologies learn the user’s behavior. For instance lets say a friend of yours has an oddly spelled name. If you are constantly correcting Swype’s predictive entries, that will carry over into Nuance’s voice-recognition input when speaking your friend's name. Nuance will know to use the odd spelling of your friend’s name during dictation if the context is right.

The big question though with Nuance’s latest acquisition is, will user’s see Swype on the iPhone anytime soon?

“I’d love to be able to see that. There are certainly lots of requests to see Swype on the iPhone.”

Well, officially on the iPhone anyway.



Source: TechCrunch

[PathKiller29]

People were asking for a while, wynd did a pretty solid job

[mallenass]

i tried this on my galaxy tab...... swipe typing is siht utter siht...

maybe it would be practical if you could swipe over the spacebar and swipe up a new word withought lifting your finger....wich is not the case, so you have to swipetype a word, pres spacebar and swipetype the next, witch turns out to take more time than just tap away..
just my 2c

p.l.u.r

[vantheman169]

meh. If i am gonna type that much on my iPhone i would flip is to landscape mode and use both hands. That would be a better comparison, but I am happy with the way my iPhone types. Wouldnt mind trying an official version of Swype on the iPhone tho...

[McAndrew]

i tried this on my galaxy tab...... swipe typing is siht utter siht...

maybe it would be practical if you could swipe over the spacebar and swipe up a new word withought lifting your finger....wich is not the case, so you have to swipetype a word, pres spacebar and swipetype the next, witch turns out to take more time than just tap away..
just my 2c

p.l.u.r

you know there is an option that automatically puts a space when you swype the word right?

[nbsmatambo]

Just tried this with my phone, and i was done 3 seconds before the Omnia....so...yea...

[Tomcat50]

Hated swype. I care not if comes to iPhone I wont be using it.

[duromega]

I remember using something like this when I used to have a palm in the 90's 

[imnothardcore]

i tried this on my galaxy tab...... swipe typing is siht utter siht...

maybe it would be practical if you could swipe over the spacebar and swipe up a new word withought lifting your finger....wich is not the case, so you have to swipetype a word, pres spacebar and swipetype the next, witch turns out to take more time than just tap away..
just my 2c

p.l.u.r

you shouldnt have to hit space. When I had my Android phone youd swipe a word it would auto space then youd swipe the next and so on. Once I got used to it I thought it was pretty slick. Made one hand typing pretty easy.

It could be a setting somewhere...

[politicalslug]

Swype is totally awesome but it doesn't take advantage of multitouch. Perhaps given current tragic events Apple will open up more and become a more flexible adaptable company. Or Apple could just buy Nuance and claim to have created its magical software portfolio from scratch. Either way I'm fine with the results.

[Lombardo Joe]

I could get used to it (Cydia version, forget what it was called).

[sziklassy]

i tried this on my galaxy tab...... swipe typing is siht utter siht...

maybe it would be practical if you could swipe over the spacebar and swipe up a new word withought lifting your finger....wich is not the case, so you have to swipetype a word, pres spacebar and swipetype the next, witch turns out to take more time than just tap away..
just my 2c

p.l.u.r

Couple things. First, this isn't meant for tablets. Its meant for fast typing on a smaller device (phone) with just one thumb. Second, you are supposed to swype type a word, life finger, and swype type the next, and so on. You should not need to hit the space bar after every word. Try it on a device that it was legitimately launched and supported on, not just one that it was ported to or in beta with. I guarantee you will not be disappointed. For quick one finger typing, it really is VERY good.

[Jcbzr]

i tried this on my galaxy tab...... swipe typing is siht utter siht...

maybe it would be practical if you could swipe over the spacebar and swipe up a new word withought lifting your finger....wich is not the case, so you have to swipetype a word, pres spacebar and swipetype the next, witch turns out to take more time than just tap away..
just my 2c

p.l.u.r

If you fear change, give it to me.