Swype supports Google's Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system and Nuance's Dragon Go application. Careful: it's a little rough around the edges, Swype warned.
Gesture input software maker
Swype now supports Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android 4.0, or Ice Cream Sandwich,
operating system and has been integrated with Nuance Communications'
(NASDAQ:NUAN) Dragon Go! Android application.
Swype makes a predictive
text application that allows users to "write" words on Android
smartphones' virtual keyboards by swiping their fingers from letter to letter
rather than tapping the virtual keys.
The
startup was acquired by speech-recognition software maker Nuance for $102.5
million.
Swype
said on Nuance's blog that users of the
Swype
beta app should receive the upgrade to version v3.26.92.38303 over the air.
U.S. users can tap the
"Dragon" key to use the Dragon dictations software, and press and
hold the Dragon key to launch
Dragon
Go, the Android mobile app that lets users access and search Websites and
apps by speaking into their phones.
Websites that are
voice-enabled by Go include AccuWeather, Ask.com, Bing, Dictionary.com, ESPN,
Facebook, Fandango, Last.fm, LiveNation, Milo.com, OpenTable, Pandora, Rotten
Tomatoes, Spotify, Twitter, Wikipedia, Wolfram|Alpha, Yelp, YouTube and many
others.
Swype said the upgrade also
boasts better prediction accuracy in several languages, along with bug fixes
that impinged the app's advanced language modeling and language dictionaries. Swype
also said it re-enabled the emoticon key in Short Message Service (SMS) apps.
Swype warned that beta users
may come across a few "hard-to-find bugs" in the update.
Indeed, the ICS build is raw
enough that Swype has asked users to disable ICS' built-in spell-checker
because Swype's own dictionary is stored separately from the ICS spell-checking
dictionary.
"Therefore, words you
add to the Swype dictionary will still show up as 'misspellings' according to
the spell-checker," Swype explained in its blog post. "This produces
a poor user experience. "
Still, the software maker is
encouraging users to test the preliminary ICS support on the Samsung Galaxy
Nexus smartphone, which is currently the only phone that supports ICS.
Also, owing to
incompatibilities between Japanese and non-Japanese builds, Swype said it will
no longer be offering Japanese through language downloads.
Swype said users who want
Japanese language support will need to uninstall the current version of Swype
and download the new English- and Japanese-only version available through the
Swype installer.
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