The patent can be either used to block competition from implementing the same features so your product is unique, or licenses could be sold to use it by others. I'm convinced that the latter is happening and the Swype app just got redundant.
I was curious about that, too, especially since the article so eloquently put it: "for whatever reason".
It linked to the patent[0], and it struck me that in the abstract, it ends with: "The present invention then generates a list of possible words associated with the entered part and presents it to user for selection."
That's kind of a... specific... outcome of the swiping and I'm surprised that's in there. As I understand it, people get all up and arms about ridiculous patent titles, but it's the full abstract that determines what it exactly covers, and if you deviate just a bit, the patent doesn't apply. In the case of the Google keyboard I use, when I finish swiping it doesn't "present a list of possible words for selection" - it just chooses the "best" one. There is a list elsewhere of alternatives, but I wonder if that's just different enough of a UX that the patent doesn't apply.
>In the case of the Google keyboard I use, when I finish swiping it doesn't "present a list of possible words for selection" - it just chooses the "best" one.
IANAL. They probably dropped the ball in writing "presents it to user". If they had stopped at "generates a list of possible words associated with the entered part." There would very likely be a sub-process that generates a list of possible words in all other implementation, that sub-process should be violating the patent regardless of what the user sees.
So you'd rather nobody got the benefit of it if you can't profit from it? Seems slightly bitter. If you genuinely can't benefit then give it away. Aside from the karma there might be unexpected secondary benefits.
The only advantage to Gboard I've seen is that it's built in. I used to use SwiftKey but eventually switched to Gboard just so I didn't have to keep SwiftKey set up.
I encounter one frustrating problem with Gboard that I never encountered on other keyboards, and I don't know if it's a bug or if I'm "using it wrong". Sometimes I will swipe-gesture a word and the keyboard simply won't recognize it as a gesture. I could be moving my finger all over the place for 5 seconds and it'll just type the last letter I land on. I backspace and do the same thing again and it works.
Am I accidentally making some sort of "out of bounds" gesture without realizing it? Is my phone too slow to start noticing that I'm swiping? Or is this just a random bug?
According to the comments on that article they do have a proper patent and do collect licensing fees from other businesses. Which may be partly why they see their consumer app as being redundant.
I occasionally give gesture typing a try since it's built into a lot of keyboards now and I've also found it to be imprecise. On a normal software keyboard I can type as fast as I want and count on autocorrect to fix most of my mistakes. When swiping I find myself stopping after every word to make sure it got the right one (it often doesn't) resulting in a halting style of typing that ends up being slower than regular typing.
I find auto-complete/suggestions to be mildly annoying at best, and auto-correct (anything that retroactively changes what I've entered) to be physically unpleasant to use.
That said, gestural input does feel significantly more natural compared to trying to cram a QWERTY layout onto a pocketable screen. For me the ideal midground has proven to be a "dumb" keyboard that has a layout designed for touchscreens from the outset; "MessageEase" (which I plug at every opportunity) uses a combination of single taps and directional swipes with a layout based on letter frequency.
It takes a bit of adjusting to, but it provides a great balance between precision and speed, while also having plenty of room for less common symbols and Ctrl/Alt/modifier keys that are useful for SSH, all without having to tap through extra layers or menus.
You are assuming that no one pays royalties, and I don't blame you because that's also implied in the article, but I have hard time to believe that companies like Google or Samsung would do that.
I think when Nuance purchased Swype all they wanted is the patent, and simply didn't want to spend resources on developing Swype when they could get money through royalties. The original Swype preferred to be sold to OEMs, but OEMs typically want to make their Android version unique, so might actually prefer to implement their own keyboard with that functionality. This plus the fact that Swype quality degraded since Nuance's purchase makes me believe that they just went the route of permitting other companies for using their patent in exchange for royalties.
I don't know, in my view a patent troll is a company that managed to obtain a patent for something trivial that most people would not even think of obtain a patent for. For example:
- displaying originating city/state based on area code of a calling number
- swipe to unlock the phone
- rounded corners
and is trying to get money from anyone who uses it
Typing through swiping is a bit more innovative.
To be honest, I think there shouldn't be any patents on software. That field is thrives on building on top of work of others, and things change quickly, so patents are actually stifling innovation. At least if software patents can't be eliminated they should be much much shorter.
For producing "normal" English with longer words it was invaluable. It also handled multiple languages with ease compared to the default iOS keyboard. But I could tell the last few years that they weren't really maintaining it. I'll probably use it until it stops working and then switch to the current state of the art.
I think the biggest problem Swype had (once it published) was probably ignoring its user base. I was one of the early adopters when it showed up on the play market and I loved it. It was one of the bigger available apps at the time so I gravitated toward it. However, they messaged a bunch of things up and didn't give us ways to turn off their "new features" and a keyboard is not something you want to change often. So, since there were copycats, I moved to one of those that gave me the freedoms that I wanted and didn't have the annoying features that I didn't. I remember the forums at the time having a HUGE amount of people claiming to be doing the same thing.
I use GBoard now and it has this horrible "correct the previous word" feature that I can't turn off. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, Google is big enough to keep it around forever without really listening to us. But this feature is awful. For an example, I'll type something like "a little bit of mambo" and, for some reason, it'll decide to replace "of" with "if" or something along those lines. It's not a consistent thing with any combination but I really don't want to have to erase two words to correct something that I had already dubbed correct before moving on.
So weird to hear of folks here trying and rejecting gesture-keyboarding. It's orders of magnitude faster for me and so much less frustrating than thumb-pecking.
Honestly I'd like it to go further. Like a keyboard gesture to autofill my email address into a text area.
Yeah I get a lot of mistypes but it still feels a lot faster than peck typing. I can also do it while I'm not really looking which is nice on a non-tactile keyboard.
WHOOAAAAA there's a "shortcut" option in here! Holy moly, that's so rad. I never actually pulled up the "Personal Dictionary" before, I just organically added words...
For me it is cool but (like voice typing) I felt that if I had to correct it once, then I could have typed it twice. For a while I used Swype but with the gestures disabled. Eventually I switched to the stock keyboard, then Gboard (with gestures disabled).
Definitely the opposite for me. Having to keep your thumb pressed on the screen while moving it around is, for me, clearly way slower and more difficult. Plus I almost always type with two hands, which doesn’t seem to even make sense with a swiping keyboard.
Yeah. I had the same reaction. Who sw(i/y)pes with their thumbs!?
I swipe almost 100% of the time but I feel the system could be improved massively with some better prediction. The Android keyboard consistently gives me the wrong input for some really common words. How does "sine" appear so often instead of the everyday word I was trying to type (I think it's "don't" but I can't remember exactly)? Why doesn't it learn as I correct it every time? Why doesn't it look at the context.
I don't know why developers don't just use Zipf's law to pick the most likely of several possible candidates. I too get annoyed when rather obscure words are suggested in preference to ones that rank near the top of the language corpus. Google's one works a bit better than the stock offerings, but of course that means another vector by which you tell Google every thought you see fit to express via mobile.
I swipe with my thumb but I have no issues writing accurately at speed, certainly faster than I can type things out in all but a few edge cases.
Added advantage of not needing to look at the screen all the time to work, something that was previously only possible with tactile keyboards back in the day.
Well now I’m really confused! If you’re holding the phone with one hand, the thumb is the only option. If you’re holding the phone with two hands, for me it’s significantly faster to essentially touch type with two thumbs rather than hold the phone with one hand and swipe with the index finger of the other.
Same, I type on my phone with two hands. My experience typically has me going back and correcting words a whole lot more often with gesture typing, which kills any time savings and speed I may have initially gotten.
Typing one or two letters then hitting the suggestion has always been way more consistent for me.
You never realize how much you rely on it until someone hands you their iPhone. It's so intuitive now I always try to do it out of habit on a friend's iPhone before realizing they don't have it.
Regular typing on phone keyboards with predictive suggestions is really helpful for me getting the spelling correct, because it gives good early feedback and can often susgest based off a full misspelling (though, I always get the impression that suggestions are not designed for my style of misspelling, for example I keep misspelling 'susgestion' in this reply and it can't cope with the extra s). The annoying side effect is that I sometimes end up with completely the wrong word.
For me, Swype style is faster, if and only if I know how to spell a word.
If I don't know the correct spelling, gesturing is useless. It predicts a completely different word.
(Side note: unlike other teens, my spelling massively improved after I got my first cellphone at age 15 and used nokia's T9 predictive texting. Simply because after you made a mistake, it stopped predicting valid words)
Modern Android keyboard actually recognizes common misspellings and just types the word you meant. It's not perfect but it's very good. And usually there are suggestions at the top that're right if it didn't figure it out.
Different people have different tastes. I'm the type of person, who's even turned off autocorrect on my phone, because that already gets on my nerves when I type a word that it doesn't know and then it "corrects" it to a different word.
Also in particular annoying when I go back and forth between two languages. Then I have to switch language on my keyboard every other time I want to type anything. And I have to get used to the different layout, which with swiping seems to be even more annoying.
I turned off autocorrect on my wife's phone as her messages didn't make sense ;) (not bothering to check the autocorrected words).
As for multi-language, SwiftKey seems pretty good, you don't need to switch between languages, it handles two (maybe three) at the same time relatively well.
I like gesture-keyboarding and saw it as a great improvement (rare situation) when it showed up on my Andriod phone. I think this is in part because my natural pointing motion causes my finger to hit hit the screen to the right of where I think I am pointing at. I have to turn my finger sideways or aim to the left of buttons to hit them consistently. Can't find a way to adjust my touch response that is not some third party ap of dubious origin.
This is really too bad. I loved Swype and used it since it was in beta. It was always (and still is) better than every other keyboard and gesture-keyboard for me. I tried switching to GBoard for a while because I felt it was inevitable that Swype would eventually be discontinued due to lack of updates. But even after several months of usage, Swype was still significantly more accurate, fast, and responsive than GBoard.
I like Swype, and continued using it on Android in preference to other swipey keyboards.
But the glory of it initially was that it made it possible to go fast on much smaller screens. I first used it very happily on a Nokia 700 (Symbian Belle phone) with a 3.2" screen that can't have been more than 4cm wide.
I briefly hoped that swipe typing would become popular enough to stall the trend for bigger and bigger screens on phones, or at least make it economic for some manufacturers to provide at least one small phone. But it seems like the opposite happened, huge screens were popular enough to make swiping pointless for most people.
I like the idea and have tried it myself, but there's no way I'd install a third party software keyboard on a device I remotely care about. That's just crazy. Second, Google's gesture typing is not part of their AOSP offering and so it requires adding the unfreely licensed libjni_latinimegoogle.so file to an Android phone running AOSP (which usually requires root). So for now, I do without.
Yeah, Android is so broken when it comes to third-party keyboards. Gives you a big bloody warning that this keyboard could steal your passwords and whatnot (with which it is absolutely right), but then doesn't even offer you the obvious solution - blocking internet access for the keyboard app.
Apple does this right, the installed keyboard is not used for passwords. So while it can see what websites you are visiting, even in Incognito mode, it doesn't ever see URLs or anything very sensitive.
I mean, it can still get all your conversations right? And web security depends on which type of DOM element is active? I would still argue this is widening the security surface area to an unnecessary degree for convenience.
I've been a swiper for years now, beginning with Swype Beta. But I've been using SwiftKey instead for the past couple years because Swype kept changing things I liked and not adding useful improvements. Well, I suppose if they're collecting sweet patent royalties from their competition, why bother maintaining a product team of their own?
Guess its pretty hard to compete with large companies over patents simply due to the networks and connections large companies can use to distribute their stuff more efficiently.
Yes. Small companies take note. Getting "NetScaped", where a big platform vendor re-implements your application and gives it away for free, is 100% normal. It appears that Swype wasn't naive about this and attempted to patent their innovation, but that BigCos conveniently circumvented that. It's practically always going to be cheaper to lock 3-4 engineers in a closet for a year and have them re-implement your software than to acquire a company.
Software companies do not get acquired for the software. They get acquired because they offer access to something that BigCo can't easily replicate, usually a loyal audience in a sector that BigCo covets (e.g., Facebook and Instagram). Sometimes it can be about intellectual property, but as we see in this case, they have big fancy lawyers and you don't, and they'll work hard to circumvent you, so you'll have to have a very robust and thorough IP base to get them to decide it's better to just buy you.
Swype is by no means the first innovative phone app to get NetScaped like this. It happens all the time.
If you're building a company in this space, where the platform operators are also the main distributors and therefore don't need your audience, be very careful. It's dicey. [This may be a good argument for alternative app stores a la Amazon's Android offering.] Blockbuster anti-trust cases only happen for companies that are the darling of 1996 Silicon Valley and the symbol of the nascent internet revolution (i.e., not you).
Agree on this, its really not the innovative tooling (although could be if you're ahead by many years or have already the best minds in your company with an on-the-way revolutionary product) but really the customers/distribution and existing relationships the acquirer is looking for.
Simply put, a technology advantage is still hard to really to quantify in business or acquisition strategy unless it already has a large amount of users or a huge advantage over building it yourself.
It seems like everyone has replaced it for the most part with gboard, but I've heard precious few people talking about wordflow. MS released it briefly on ios (and possibly android) and it had way better success rates than any other keyboards I tried. Wordflow, which is also from MS, was way worse. I still have it downloaded and in my purchased even after they removed it, still wonder why they did.
The idea of swiping seems cool at first but when you actually use it, appears that to type a word you should know in advance the gesture needed, which kinda kills the purpose. Idk maybe it works for language with shorter words like English, but with longer words it's just awful.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadIt linked to the patent[0], and it struck me that in the abstract, it ends with: "The present invention then generates a list of possible words associated with the entered part and presents it to user for selection."
That's kind of a... specific... outcome of the swiping and I'm surprised that's in there. As I understand it, people get all up and arms about ridiculous patent titles, but it's the full abstract that determines what it exactly covers, and if you deviate just a bit, the patent doesn't apply. In the case of the Google keyboard I use, when I finish swiping it doesn't "present a list of possible words for selection" - it just chooses the "best" one. There is a list elsewhere of alternatives, but I wonder if that's just different enough of a UX that the patent doesn't apply.
[0] https://patents.google.com/patent/US7098896
IANAL. They probably dropped the ball in writing "presents it to user". If they had stopped at "generates a list of possible words associated with the entered part." There would very likely be a sub-process that generates a list of possible words in all other implementation, that sub-process should be violating the patent regardless of what the user sees.
I think there wasn't interest because handwritting seems like old tech :)
To be honest, though, I never did like using gesture based swipe typing. It always felt like a sloppy and imprecise input method to me.
I encounter one frustrating problem with Gboard that I never encountered on other keyboards, and I don't know if it's a bug or if I'm "using it wrong". Sometimes I will swipe-gesture a word and the keyboard simply won't recognize it as a gesture. I could be moving my finger all over the place for 5 seconds and it'll just type the last letter I land on. I backspace and do the same thing again and it works.
Am I accidentally making some sort of "out of bounds" gesture without realizing it? Is my phone too slow to start noticing that I'm swiping? Or is this just a random bug?
That said, gestural input does feel significantly more natural compared to trying to cram a QWERTY layout onto a pocketable screen. For me the ideal midground has proven to be a "dumb" keyboard that has a layout designed for touchscreens from the outset; "MessageEase" (which I plug at every opportunity) uses a combination of single taps and directional swipes with a layout based on letter frequency.
It takes a bit of adjusting to, but it provides a great balance between precision and speed, while also having plenty of room for less common symbols and Ctrl/Alt/modifier keys that are useful for SSH, all without having to tap through extra layers or menus.
I think when Nuance purchased Swype all they wanted is the patent, and simply didn't want to spend resources on developing Swype when they could get money through royalties. The original Swype preferred to be sold to OEMs, but OEMs typically want to make their Android version unique, so might actually prefer to implement their own keyboard with that functionality. This plus the fact that Swype quality degraded since Nuance's purchase makes me believe that they just went the route of permitting other companies for using their patent in exchange for royalties.
trolling comes down to their use of patent ownership and how they (ab)use it to make cash.
- displaying originating city/state based on area code of a calling number
- swipe to unlock the phone
- rounded corners
and is trying to get money from anyone who uses it
Typing through swiping is a bit more innovative.
To be honest, I think there shouldn't be any patents on software. That field is thrives on building on top of work of others, and things change quickly, so patents are actually stifling innovation. At least if software patents can't be eliminated they should be much much shorter.
I use GBoard now and it has this horrible "correct the previous word" feature that I can't turn off. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, Google is big enough to keep it around forever without really listening to us. But this feature is awful. For an example, I'll type something like "a little bit of mambo" and, for some reason, it'll decide to replace "of" with "if" or something along those lines. It's not a consistent thing with any combination but I really don't want to have to erase two words to correct something that I had already dubbed correct before moving on.
I've been having this exact problem with both swype and SwiftKey. anyone know a gesture keyboard without this crap?
Honestly I'd like it to go further. Like a keyboard gesture to autofill my email address into a text area.
Anyway, I love it. Y'all crazy.
This always make me laugh when said figuratively.
You made my day!
thumb swiping works fine for 3-word responses, anything more than that and it's the index finger that goes to work.
I swipe almost 100% of the time but I feel the system could be improved massively with some better prediction. The Android keyboard consistently gives me the wrong input for some really common words. How does "sine" appear so often instead of the everyday word I was trying to type (I think it's "don't" but I can't remember exactly)? Why doesn't it learn as I correct it every time? Why doesn't it look at the context.
Added advantage of not needing to look at the screen all the time to work, something that was previously only possible with tactile keyboards back in the day.
Typing one or two letters then hitting the suggestion has always been way more consistent for me.
Regular typing on phone keyboards with predictive suggestions is really helpful for me getting the spelling correct, because it gives good early feedback and can often susgest based off a full misspelling (though, I always get the impression that suggestions are not designed for my style of misspelling, for example I keep misspelling 'susgestion' in this reply and it can't cope with the extra s). The annoying side effect is that I sometimes end up with completely the wrong word.
For me, Swype style is faster, if and only if I know how to spell a word.
If I don't know the correct spelling, gesturing is useless. It predicts a completely different word.
(Side note: unlike other teens, my spelling massively improved after I got my first cellphone at age 15 and used nokia's T9 predictive texting. Simply because after you made a mistake, it stopped predicting valid words)
Also in particular annoying when I go back and forth between two languages. Then I have to switch language on my keyboard every other time I want to type anything. And I have to get used to the different layout, which with swiping seems to be even more annoying.
As for multi-language, SwiftKey seems pretty good, you don't need to switch between languages, it handles two (maybe three) at the same time relatively well.
You can swipe for "navigation" and set new long-press strings.
I don't trust any of the closed source options.
Who wants to start a bounty on an open source replacement?
RIP Swype.
But the glory of it initially was that it made it possible to go fast on much smaller screens. I first used it very happily on a Nokia 700 (Symbian Belle phone) with a 3.2" screen that can't have been more than 4cm wide.
I briefly hoped that swipe typing would become popular enough to stall the trend for bigger and bigger screens on phones, or at least make it economic for some manufacturers to provide at least one small phone. But it seems like the opposite happened, huge screens were popular enough to make swiping pointless for most people.
Software companies do not get acquired for the software. They get acquired because they offer access to something that BigCo can't easily replicate, usually a loyal audience in a sector that BigCo covets (e.g., Facebook and Instagram). Sometimes it can be about intellectual property, but as we see in this case, they have big fancy lawyers and you don't, and they'll work hard to circumvent you, so you'll have to have a very robust and thorough IP base to get them to decide it's better to just buy you.
Swype is by no means the first innovative phone app to get NetScaped like this. It happens all the time.
If you're building a company in this space, where the platform operators are also the main distributors and therefore don't need your audience, be very careful. It's dicey. [This may be a good argument for alternative app stores a la Amazon's Android offering.] Blockbuster anti-trust cases only happen for companies that are the darling of 1996 Silicon Valley and the symbol of the nascent internet revolution (i.e., not you).
Simply put, a technology advantage is still hard to really to quantify in business or acquisition strategy unless it already has a large amount of users or a huge advantage over building it yourself.