Nuance To Acquire Swype For $100+ Million | Hacker News Reader

Nuance To Acquire Swype For $100+ Million

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Having used Swype, Flex T9, and Dragon Natural Speaking, this buyout bothers me.

And that's because while Swype really seems to get what customer support is all about, Nuance itself is still into customer support circa 1998. Email support with automated wizards. A terrible "knowledge base". Seemingly no phone support. No forums. No wiki.

It's honestly shocking how terrible and corporate focused Nuance's customer support is, given the nature of many of the customers of Dragon Naturally Speaking.

I wish the folks at Swype the best, once I started using it, I became unable to use tap tap touchscreen keyboards.

On the other hand, I do find a comment from a Verizon salesman I was speaking to interesting. And it matches my own experience. Really fast typers or texters want a physical keyboard. The problem I have with Swype is that after Swyping a sentence or two, I have to look at what is being input because salad cookies wrong easily diction mumble bad. Elephant.

I picked up Flex T9 because I got an Android tablet not supported by Swype, and Flex T9 is very good at swyping. But it is not nearly as good as Swype and it is basically impossible to talk to Nuance about the problems. And unlike Swype, there have been no updates.

So this could be a terrific marriage, especially if Siri technology trickles into Swype and Nuance pulls its head out of its butt and figures out what customer support is circa 2012.

But boy, their support website is so awful, it's hard to imagine.

My understanding from having talked to Nuance employees is that they're really a series of basically independent companies. Hopefully Swype can keep things together: I'm a fan of their product.

I have used swype to text with my non dominant hand, swaying back and forth in the subway with full accuracy. Without it I honestly feel like I don't have a keyboard installed.

I keep waiting for it to exit beta and show up in the market. This acquisition, while good for Swype, makes me feel like that is just not going to happen. I expect licenses and bundling with phones. I hope I'm wrong.

In the best way possible, I hope you're wrong too. But that's clearly where the money is, and from this FAQ it sounds like there are some technical pains-in-the-asses with developing and supporting an app like this, which I can certainly understand:

http://beta.swype.com/android/faq/

Nuance already sells a Swype like keyboard in the Market as FlexT9, bundling is not their only business model.

PS: what you describe is precisely Swype's business model.

It is one part of their business model but there is also a pretty extensive consumer direct beta program that I'm still part of.

Nuance bought ShapeWriter a year ago, and took it off Android market. A few months later they started selling it as FlexT9, but a year later it's still blocked outside the USA. I'm almost ready to flash Cyanogenmod on my Nexus just so I can use Market Enabler to buy it in Canada. I'm not exactly optimistic about this development.

How is this worth $100m+ ?

T9 is/was a feature of nearly every feature phone available after its introduction.

Swype has the potential to be T9 for touchscreens. There's a lot of money to be made licensing that technology.

I texted as little as possible before swype. Now I prefer it to talking.

I think they wanted a 7x return on investment. But you are right, I don't see the value either... unless they have some seriously good language models built in 50 languages and the patents surrounding their interface, models, etc.

FTA: "Congratulations to the founders and executives (Mike McSherry, Cliff Kushler, Aaron Sheedy, Loreen Milbrath and Mark Illing), employees and investors (the company has raised just $14 million)."

That they raised only $14 M is the most surprising part of this. Nice work.

no other product tried so hard to drive me away as swype.

first version i tried, perfect, easy to change languages, just no non-english dict.

second version, i was downloading updates like a madman. not so easy to change languages. still no dict for non-english. harder to type in symbols i use often.

tird version. same problems. plus a change of settings to auto correct words that i had to find out how to turn off.

fourth... i don't really remember what they changed on the 4th update, maybe they made numbers as hard as the symbols now... all i know is that i'm back to the stock keyboard and after adding words like crazy to my personal dict, i don't miss swype the slightest. good riddance.

edit: remembered what they changed last... it was a mindfuck way of handling punctuation/backspace/space with the feature that delete the word right after it's typed.

Wow. For a second there, I thought that said Skype.

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