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Nuance Gets in the Swipe to Type Market with T9 Trace

by Caleb Johnson on March 24, 2010 at 03:55 PM


It looks like the race is on to see who can offer the fastest text-entry for touchscreen phones. By now, everybody knows about Swype, which recently helped a man set a Guinness World Record for texting. But a new player is about to join this race.

According to Engadget, Nuance, the company behind the hugely popular T9 predictive text functions in most phones, recently announced its T9 Trace technology. It's pretty similar to Swype; you start out by pressing your finger to a key and then you slide your finger across the screen, stopping briefly at the character you want to input. Repeat until you've spelled out a word, and you'll never have to lift a finger. But it is T9 Trace's other features that could set it apart from the competition: it supports about 70 languages, has error correction capabilities and also auto-completes or predicts words as you type.

As of now, Nuance hasn't confirmed when or where T9 Trace will show up. But we're certainly seeing the next phase of text messaging in these touch-based advances. Once this kind of text-entry tech becomes widely used by phone providers, we'll no longer have to endure those annoying taps and pecks from the guy next to us on our morning commute. [From: Engadget]

Tags: cell phones, cellphone, CellPhones, swype, t9, t9 prediction, t9 trace, T9Prediction, T9Trace, Texting, TextMessaging, top, touchscreen

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