T9 gets an upgrade with Swype

Some of you might remember texting for the first time, and thinking: “Man, I got to hit one button four times just to get the letter S, the most often used consonant”. T9 was able to remove some of that frustration by guessing what words you would type, but it has a bad habit of mixing up certain words, like texting in the word “home” would often result in the word “good”.

The man who invented T9, Cliff Kushler, has developed a new system of texting called Swype, which allows the user to enter in text by connecting the dots on a touchscreen keyboard. As you can see by the illustration, it allows you to type words “quick”. (See, he’s connecting the letters of the word quick, get it?)

Kushler recently did a demonstration of this product and was able to text at 55 words a minute. I can only guess that this is fast, because I can type on a keyboard a lot faster than that. However, he beat my texting record of twenty words a minute. (Yeah, I’m that slow.)

You know how the T9 program can recognize words? Apparently, the Swype can recognize them as well, because the user does not have to hit the spacebar. Yes, there is something in the program that can recognize words and put the spaces between them automatically.

The designers of Swype are planning to focus putting their new program on Windows Mobile, but there is no word when it will be out, if at all.

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