Swype update makes it ICS friendly and integrates Dragon GO!

Swype is one of the more versatile on-screen keyboards for the mobile phone genre in technology. In a bid to take the application to the next level, Swype was bought by Nunace, back in October for a sum of about $100 million. A number like that only made users sit up and take notice of its worth.

In a recent announcement, Nuance stated that all Beta users of the Swype application would be getting an all new update that would bring a few extra goodies to the table. Nuance’s website had a post declaring that an Over-the-air (directly through Swype’s built-in update process) update was on its way and it would include a few more bug fixes, and a preliminary release of the long-awaited Ice Cream Sandwich support. For the Swype fans still on Gingerbread, it should make no difference, until you can upgrade to Google’s latest edition to their mobile OS.  As of now, Google’s Galaxy Nexus users are the only ‘beneficiaries’ to the update.

Going ICS

The company also mentioned that their initial release for ICS could still contain a few, hard-to-find bugs, but updates for those would be out presumably when Google lets out a major dose of ICS glory to the Android community. Some of the new features would include language downloads and advanced language modelling. For U.S users. the latest Swype update will also feature the new Dragon GO! integration, which will enable users to use Dragon Dictation by simply tapping the “Dragon” key placed on the keypad itself.

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The company also said that their goal was to aim for - significantly improved prediction accuracy in a number of languages, as we’ve squashed a couple of bugs that were affecting our Advanced Language Modeling and language dictionaries. WXGA-resolution (1280 x 768) devices will also enjoy the benefits of language downloads and the re-enabled EMOTICON key in SMS apps (when the app requests it).

They’ve also listed a few ‘words of warning’ –

• Ice Cream Sandwich users are strongly encouraged to disable ICS’ built-in spell checker. Swype’s dictionary is stored separately from the dictionary that ICS uses for spell-checking. Therefore words added to the Swype dictionary will still show up as “misspellings”, according to the spell-checker.
• Japanese users should be aware that due to incompatibilities between Japanese and non-Japanese build configurations, Japanese via language downloads would not be offered. Instead, users who want Japanese language support would need to uninstall the current version of Swype and download the new ENGLISH+JAPANESE only version available through the Swype Installer.