

It’s been a while since Swype was a household name but it remains one of the more stable and popular gesture-typing keyboards available today. Nuance Communications, developers of Swype, have released a fairly substantial update to Swype that begins rolling out today. Included will be themes, a new emoji keyboard, and some new features.

Here is a full list of the major changes with the new update:

Swype has been working on their prediction technology and that shines through a bit in this update. The keyboard now has enhanced phrase prediction and will offer up multiple words at once to try to help you complete sentences.

Swype makes up for the lack of a number row by predicting numbers as you type. For instance, if you type out a number in letters, the keyboard will let you convert them to numbers very quickly using the prediction bar. This also works with symbols so typing “ejqp” will bring up a suggestion for 3:10 while “swpp” will just suggest $200.

Chinese language support is getting a boost. Nuance has announced that the Chinese language will use cloud-based predictions to offer up more “sophisticated and robust” language models. If you use this in Chinese, that means your predictions will get much better.

They have also included 19 Star Trek themes for more personalization and customization. The themes range from $0.99 to $1.99 as in-app purchases and there theme bundles that will go for $2.99.



It may appear as though Swype is playing catch-up in a lot of instances, a few of these features are rather interesting. The ability to mitigate the lack of a number row by moving the functionality to the prediction bar is something we don’t see all that often and makes it much easier to type numbers without switching from letter to number input or waiting to hold each tap. The new capability to predict phrases is also somewhat unusual and if it works correctly, it should help boost typing speeds by a bit.

The Star Wars themes appear to be tastefully done in most cases and fans of the series should get a kick out of the available themes. It’s a good update and one that gives the aging keyboard a bit more flair.

Swype is currently going for $0.99 in the Google Play Store. If you want to try it out with the new update and themes, click the button below to get started!