Swype Android Beta Adds Dragon Speech, Handwriting Recognition

Nuance's Swype app offers a new winning combination for fast typing on Android devices: gestures and Dragon speech recognition, with handwriting recognition thrown in for good measure.

A short intro takes you through Swype's main features, starting with the ability to gesture type. To gesture type, you simply drag a finger across the keyboard from letter to letter. Swype looks for patterns to produce words. It also produces a running type-ahead list of words that you can tap on to insert. Although I ran into issues with earlier versions of Swype, this beta worked very well for me on my Android tablet. I used Swype as my only input method for an entire day including two meetings in which I took notes. Taking notes using Swype was much faster than pecking on Samsung's customized Android soft keyboard. I found it interesting that holding the tablet like a notepad in one hand and gesture typing with the other resembled old-fashioned note taking with a pen and paper notepad. It was, in some sense, more natural than thumb typing or some adaptive multi-finger typing on a tablet.