Nuance was primarily a speech-recognition developer, and wanted Swype so they tie in the technology to ease keyboard input as well. In October 2011, Swype Keyboard was purchased by Nuance for $100m. There was another purchase involved before I discovered Swype. (Since then, Microsoft bought SwiftKey for $250m in February 2016, and it's now free). I found this less intuitive, and less reliable, and caused some lag on the phone I was using - so I paid for Swype. The result is astonishingly accurate.īefore deciding which one to pay for, I'd also tried the trial of SwiftKey. The app then works out which word you're typing, by looking at all the possibilities given the letters your finger moved through, whittling down to those which are known real words (or are in your custom word list), and then offering you the most common given what it has learnt of your own word frequencies. At that time, it was by far the best onscreen Android keyboard that lets you trace the word you're typing with your finger. (That link is broken, unless you too bought it).

On 31st January 2014, I paid £2.42 to Google Play for a copy of Swype Keyboard.

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