New mobile technology from Swype features the “living keyboard”

mobile technology

This text input interface steps above and beyond prediction by learning.

Android phones are already well known for their Swype technology interface for text input, but what people think they know about its capabilities is about to become a great deal more high tech.

The latest development includes updates by owner Nuance Communications to make it smarter.

It is now equipped with a foundation of the same contextual-language sophisticated capabilities that are present within its products for speech recognition. It is calling the result a “living keyboard”, as it is capable of learning the habits and vocabulary of its user.

Nuance is already fully implementing the XT9 predictive technologies into Swype.

That was a mobile technology that had originally been created by Tegic. Tegic provided the algorithms upon which Nuance was built. However, it expanded on its abilities for prognostication so that it isn’t just limited to single words, but is instead able to step beyond that, to phrase and sentence formation.

For example, the Swype keyboard trace path is all followed in the same way by the words “put”, “pit”, and “pot”, so that when the user starts to type them, a menu is provided, allowing him or her to select the correct option. However, Swype is now able to analyze the words that come before it, so that it can automatically choose the correct word based on the context of the phrase or sentence. Therefore, it would know that following “peach”, the choice is most likely to be “pit”, and that “cooking” will likely be followed by “pot”.

The intelligence of the platform moves beyond simple structure of language. According to Nuance, Swype is also capable of customizing itself specifically to the word usage of the user him or herself. It learns to be able to predict the word groupings and phrases that are typed the most frequently by the user. For example, if the user should enter “Grandma Jones” into a text message enough times, then every time “Grandma” is typed, then “Jones” will be suggested as the next word.

This latest form of mobile technology will learn from all of the different forms of entered text that are used on the device. From text messages to search engine queries and even social media posts.

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