The Future of Swype

During my time in Las Vegas for CTIA, the opportunity I was most looking forward to (besides seeing new Android devices) was a meeting with Mike McSherry, the CEO of Swype. This on-screen keyboard is the best thing to happen to the Nexus One I’m using.  I am in LOVE with this app, and so is their CEO.

A lot of Swype’s success can be attributed to two of the very talented people they have on hand helping with development. First, there is Cliff Kushler, the co-founder of T9 (yeah, that predictive text on TONS of phones all over the world), and Randy Marsden, the man behind the on-screen keyboard used in Windows. With a dynamic duo like these two, their team has two guiding lights. Additionally, it is clear that McSherry holds his entire team in very high regards–he spent a lot of time praising them for their hard work during our interview (and who doesn’t love a team that works great together to create amazing things?).

One of the most asked questions about Swype is: how come I can’t buy it from the Android market? The answer to this is pretty involved, though Mike McSherry did spend the time to explain it to me. In short, Swype has made promises to other companies that they shared their technology with and cannot go on to sell it outright before they fulfill those promises. I guess the silver lining to this is that Swype will be nearly perfected by the time it does arrive in the Android market. Oh, did you catch that? Yeah, they do plan on adding it to the market eventually–I know a few people who will be waiting impatiently for that.

As far as enhancing the quality of Swype, the company is already actively doing this. For starters, there is a reason that beta a lot of people joined expires: improvements! Many of our readers asked: does Swype plan to support voice input? From the chat with McSherry, I’d say the answer is yes. Oddly enough, I didn’t realize Swype was not just a keyboard that would make its home on mobile phones. In fact, Swype has plans to put their software on every device that they can to help enhance the user experience. Want an example? Yeah, so did I. To demonstrate, McSherry pulled out his HP laptop, remote, and USB receiver. He then demonstrated how Swype can work on a TV. After his demo, he let me try using it, too. It took a bit of getting used to, since I’m accustomed to using my fingertip, but it’s definitely something I could nearly master in a few minutes. Remember when companies started announcing things like Twitter integration on their cable boxes? If you’re like me, you were wondering if anything worse existed on TVs than slowly scrolling to letters with the directional pad. Well, Swype seeks to remedy this silly problem.

Overall, it seems Mike McSherry is really interested in making communication easier for everyone, no matter the device. He commented, “We’re looking for something specific with Swype: ubiquity.” Looks like they’re on the right track with many new Android devices coming with Swype as the default keyboard. No complaints from me. Keep it up team Swype!