23 March 2010

Users Can Now Elegantly Glide from One Letter
to the Next on Their Touchscreen Keypads
for Faster, Easier Text Input

Nuance Communications, Inc., today announced Nuance T9 Trace, a continuous touch input technology designed specifically for touchscreen phones. With Nuance T9 Trace, consumers simply glide their finger from one letter to another on their touchscreen QWERTY or touchscreen 12-key keypads, spelling words quickly with no stylus or other implement needed.

What especially caught my attention is that this Nuance's continuous touch input technology looks exactly the same as patented Swype interface that enables users to create words with one continuous finger motion across an on-screen keyboard, first introduced way back in December of 2008!? If this is not violation of the patent, than what is!? Anyway, here is the rest of the press.

Touchscreen devices have taken the global market by storm, and according to a recent report from Strategy Analytics, will grow nearly 30 percent a year reaching almost 500M devices by 2014. As touchscreens become increasingly popular, consumers are demanding simpler ways to input text for email, text messaging, instant messaging and other activities, making multi-modal input a key focus of global device manufacturers. Nuance T9 Trace offers mobile device manufacturers the latest in continuous touch input across the variety of mobile platforms they bring to market, and will be available as an extension to Nuance XT9’s trusted and proven predictive text capabilities.

Nuance XT9 truly enhances the Nuance T9 Trace consumer experience, giving users the ability to input text even faster and easier with words and phrases appearing as consumers trace. And Nuance XT9’s word prediction and error correction capabilities deliver faster input with superior word-completion accuracy. Additionally, Nuance T9 Trace allows users to seamlessly switch back and forth between typing and tracing at any time, providing even more control and ease of use.

“Touchscreen devices are experiencing explosive growth, but there is high consumer demand to make text entry easier on virtual keypads,” said Michael Thompson, senior vice president and general manager, Nuance Mobile. “Nuance T9 Trace not only makes text input fast and easy by gliding your finger from one letter to another, but it also gives our partners an innovative way to differentiate their touchscreen phone portfolio.”

Because Nuance T9 Trace is designed to integrate directly with Nuance XT9, Nuance offers its handset manufacturer partners significant and unique efficiencies in device integration times, memory consumption, and global language support. These capabilities, coupled with the recently announced Nuance T9 Write handwriting technology, enable Nuance partners to leverage one robust yet simple predictive input technology suite, enabling them to bring multimodal input to more devices in more markets faster. And because the full Nuance T9 portfolio supports more than 80 languages worldwide, OEMs can offer amazing multimodal input experiences in both established and emerging markets.

Nuance T9 Trace joins Nuance’s broad mobile portfolio of pervasive mobile speech and predictive input solutions. Nuance’s mobile portfolio is changing the way consumers interact with their mobile phones to send text messages and email, place calls, and access the mobile Web for information, directions, music and more. Nuance’s mobile solutions ship on more than four billion handsets — a result of its extensive relationships with every major mobile OEM and carriers around the world. For more information about Nuance T9 Trace, please visit www.nuance.com/t9trace.