Swype To Bring First OTA Update; New Context Prediction Engine Incoming

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Most of you have been in love with uber-popular Swype, which is the best Android virtual keyboard. Still, are you installing beta version of Swype with the help of an installer app? Yes, you need to log-in each time to download it. In late September, Swype released Beta Version 3.26, bringing improved language control, a refined key layout, new settings and help. Big news is that Swype would be having automatic update capabilities. All the future updates of Swype would be pushed out directly to the app itself OTA (Over-The-Air). You’ll be getting notifications to let you know an update is available, and install it right through the settings. Yes, it’s an easier OTA process, which keeps all your settings not damaged. Swype Beta users can expect an update notification of the first OTA update within 72 hours. The first OTA update is going out to testers today.

What’s new in this update? Not a lot of stuff actually. The new OTA firmware update of Swype will bring a new feature called Context Prediction Engine, that uses context to improve results. This feature will be activated via this OTA update, which will do statistical analysis of your typing history. While continually learning from your typing, it uses that stored data to predict what you want to say as you type the words with 40% improvement in accuracy. Swype claims that “It Learns over time as you use it, building up a personal language profile for you”. Unfortunately, the prediction engine feature is only available in a few languages – English, Spanish, French, Italian and German. Swype has confirmed that other languages are coming soon.

Japanese would be glad to hear that the update is bringing native Japanese language support, though they will be left to access the context prediction engine feature for the moment. It will add support for Japanese with kana-kanji conversion, which is available in the pan-Asia package. Full details can be found at the source link at below.

Here is the detailed explanation about the new Contact Prediction Engine straight from Swype team:

This version of Swype contains a new component that we call the Context Prediction Engine (or “CPE” for short). CPE provides Swype with more sophisticated linguistic processing that improves both swyping and tapping accuracy. It does this by looking at previous words that you have entered (i.e., context) and which words tend to follow. For example, if you enter the phrase “I jumped into the mosh” and then swyped from ‘p’ to ‘t’, you would expect Swype to generate “pit” as the default choice. Without CPE, Swype would have generated “put” because it is a more common word, but with CPE it favors “pit”. The overall effect that you should see is improvements in Swype’s choices when you swype or tap. CPE also learns as you use Swype; there will be additional improvements as you continue to use it.

So guys, keep Swyping. Swype faster!

Source: Swype Forum

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