CNN Writes About The Man Behind T9 and Swype

For a alternate on-screen keyboard, Swype certainly gets a tremendous amount of attention from the mainstream media. In what I think is the second article I have seen about him, CNN writes about Cliff Kushler, who co-invented T9 and Swype. The article goes into Kushler's background, who's desire to learn how to speak with dolphins lead him to get a degree in computer engineering, with a focus on disability communication. After college Kushler worked on systems to help the disabled communicate. The predecessor of T9, called T7, was eye tracking software to help paraplegics enter text. Most people who use Swype rave about it, and I often used it on my Nexus One, although I have not installed it on my Nexus S because I am finding that the stock on-screen keyboard with Android 2.3 works very well. We've written about Swype many times because of its unique way of entering text on a keyboard. Rather than tapping each button of a word you slide your finger from button to button without lifting it from the screen. The recognition software in Swype determines what word you are entering based on the sequence of buttons in the pattern that you trace on the screen. Some people are able to very quickly enter text using Swype, and it has been used to set world records for writing the fastest text message on a mobile phone. In the article Kushler gives some insight into the future of Swype, with the company working on interpretation of sentence syntax to more reliably guess words. Swype is mostly available on Android and Windows Mobile phones, with Apple and Microsoft choosing to not allow third party on-screen keyboards for the iPhone and Windows Phone 7. Swype was in a closed beta for most of 2010, but the beta recently opened to more people.

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CNN Writes About The Man Behind T9 and Swype

Frank McPherson

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