I Am Aaron Sheedy, VP of Swype at Nuance – Ask Me Anything!

Can you guys please implement the option to change the key hold duration?

I've been using Swiftkey with the duration set to ~350ms, and when I bought Swype yesterday and tried to hold one of the top row letters to type a number... http://i.imgur.com/euCPPVZ.jpg

This is a big issue for a lot of you. We totally get it. Stay tuned!

Is there any chance we could get the ability to customize the trail color? Orange really harshes my metaphorical metal.

Any chance we could have the option to replace Dragon with Google voice typing?

Customizable trace paths we do love. I want soccer balls in mine personally. So look for that in the future.....

On Dragon, I'd implore you to give DD a try since ALL dictation technologies need a bit of time to build a personal acoustic model. For DD it takes about a minute of data to begin taking effect and then 10-20min to really optimize. Once optimized, we think DD is better than GV.

Awesome. Thanks for the response.

I've been using Swype since 2010, and have alternated between it and SwiftKey. Its quite impressive to go look at my old screenshots and compare them to where it is now

Man, you should see our 2006 keyboard designs! We had dynamic key size based on the frequency use of the character. Geek-chic....but Ugly.

I've always wanted to know. Why did it take so long for you guys to get into the Google Play store? Was there a strategic plan? Financial matter?

Also, are you concerned about SwiftKey now having "Flow", and the Android 4.2 keyboard having the ability to "swype" as well?

And to your second question, Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Fortunately for us, their versions really aren't quite as good from an accuracy, speed, and quality perspective. My opinion of course <g>

Totally agree with you here. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to use other keyboard (because some of them were better at static typing, at the time) and having tried typing anything with two consecutive letters was damn near impossible. I can't tell you how much I appreciate being able to remove the "Dragon Speech" thing on the main keyboard (I actually bought it because I saw that option in the Google Play Screenshots) - I used to hit that all the time on accident and the animation was far too long. I love the new keyboard though, both for Swyping and for typing. It's absolutely fantastic.

Only one thing - is there any chance we'd ever see Google's native voice client? The offline voice prediction is just fantastic when you have an awful data signal like I do around work.

Well, I'd really encourage you to stick with Dragon for a bit. Dragon Dict. starts off strong....but all voice systems get significantly better as you use them and we find that DD starts to significantly improve after just 1 min of voice data. And after 10-20 mins of usage, you should have an optimal personal model on the server.

Why isn't the Swype tech/interface patentable? Apple has successfully defended patents on FAR less original interface stuff.

Hey FG, we do have patents around the Swype interface. Cliff worked on Swype for about 6 years in his basement before he figured out how to actually get it to work properly....and filed a few patents along the way.

Great question! For years we were really focused on our OEM disto so that honestly consumed a tremendous amount of our attention and resources.
But we're psyched to be out now. It's about time. :-)

I was curious as to whether you've ever had any contact with Apple. Any conversations to see if they might have been interested in licensing your technology?

Hah. The million (ok billion) $ questions. Yes, we have chatted with them, they are very smart and nice.

Perhaps if you were looking for it to be a billion dollar question that might tell us a little bit as to why that hasn't happened yet. :)

Are you saying I'm expecting too much? Ok Tim, HALF! :-)

Can we got the option to let the voice key be Google voice typing please?

Yeah we've gotten this a few times now.

I'd implore you to give Dragon Dictation a try since ALL dictation technologies need a bit of time to build a personal acoustic model. For DD it takes about a minute of data to begin taking effect and then 10-20min to really optimize. Once optimized, we think DD is better than GV.

Would love to have some of you give it a good solid hammering and tell us if you still see performance gaps.

For me, it isn't so much about accuracy, which is virtually perfect with both systems, it's more about real time transcription and being able to see what you're typing as you're speaking, as well as the ability to easily select the correct alternative on occasions when it does get it wrong.

Of course I realize that you're not going to implement a competing technology directly into your product no matter how much better it might be, but it would be great to see feature parity. The current lackluster voice typing is the only thing that makes me want to go back to another keyboard.

JPB - thanks for the clarification about base recognition accuracy vs performance. One is incredibly hard to fix, the other is not. So without promising too much....we get it.

Why is it that about half the time, Swype thinks mean "BBW" when I'm typing "be"? Are you guys really into larger ladies? I mean, no judgment, it's just that I'm far more likely to be typing "be" on an average day.

Hah. Even WE are not perfect. Three answers; suppress BBW by pressing and holding on it in the word choice list; slightly shorten the trace path (terrible answer); and we'll look to reduce the weight of BBW in the language model. Good catch.

I'm Swype user since the beginning and I just wanted to say: you guys are awesome! I'm even Swyping this comment right now ;) love it!

Thank you!

Are there plans for a version of Swype that does not require full network access, and preferably drops a bunch of other permissions as well?

Contrary to what some people think, most functionality can be implemented without this permission, including dictionary and software updates, while this permission does allow apps to upload any and all data, including passwords entered using Swype.

Having full network access requires users to have blind faith in the trustworthiness of Nuance, which I explicitly don't have.

Also, congratulations on releasing your keyboard on Google Play!

TM. Totally understand your perspective. You don't need to agree to ANY of the connected terms for Swype to work out of the box. But Google Pops a very aggressive "permissions" box that really isn't that accurate.

If you know people dislike this, you should know that it's also entirely possible to just also release a version that never even asks for these permissions.

I'm not even aware of any functionality that would need to be removed - it just requires proper design that may be difficult for a company like Nuance. Like I said, dictionary and software updates can be done without this permission.

The permissions dialog is really only aggressive, because Swype requires an aggressive permission, and requires blind faith. KeyMonk (free / paid) shows it can be done without asking for a single unnecessary permission. The competition isn't waiting for you, so what are you waiting for?

Just some food for thought. I hope I explained properly above why privacy is so important to the users of an app that handles passwords.

TM, these are great points, I see what you mean.

Swype offers its own connected services via Swype Connect like language downloads and personal dictionary Backup & Sync. So, we have to have a way to deliver these straight to the end user. I think this might be why you see some differences between other keyboards and Swype as far as permissions go.

About passwords... Swype explicitly does NOT 'learn' or store anything when the user enters a password field. We detect the field (because it's declared by Android) and disable any kind of dictionary additions etc.

Any chance we'll get the "classic" Swype theme in an update (the grey keys with the blue line)? For some reason I really don't like the orange line as much but I will use it anyways because this is still the best keyboard out there. ;P

Loved/miss this theme so much :)

http://i.imgur.com/PESzVGY.png

Ah the classic style! We do love it. We moved to the Orange and Grey in order to satisfy...hmm...shall we say a logo agreement with another blue, similar logo. :-)

Hmm...trying to figure out which one you're referring to. Drawing a blank... :P

EDIT: I see you guys have the blue line in the "Cloud" theme. Just no grey keys. :/ If only we could mix/match line colors and key colors wink wink. ;)

Yes, we're actually looking at enabling more color combo's....but we don't want our keyboard ending up looking like a circa 2005 myspace page. :-)

Can we please have a holo blue theme to better match the current theme of android? Imo this is the only thing swiftkey has on you .

Yeah....I'd love to be blue. Seriously! But we have a little TM thing between another Swype sounding name...who is blue...and who politely asked us not to use so much blue.....you get the picture.

isn't there quite a difference in the two shades of blue though lol. Some themes will theme Swype via theme chooser, but not many. How about a minimalistic theme? Black and white and nothing more? Thank you for the explain though.

It's frustrating, no doubt about it. We had a black internal theme with absolutely no key borders at all. Super minimalist. Maybe we'll bring that back?

...or maybe I should just hit reply <g>

Galaxy Note 2 owner here. Would use/buy swype if it supported a row of numbers on top of qwerty keyboard.

Well, our current UX opinion on an additional number row that it really kills the remaining real-estate for the actual app that you are trying to enter text into.

What we have done is implement a Swype Key to #5 gesture to bring up the Number Layer - which is much more efficient to enter numbers in than a horizontal layout.

Anyway, grab the 30 day trial and let us know what you think?

Swype Beta will become more of a "true" Beta. We'll release A/B UX test versions, languages that are still in development but needing native speaker feedback, etc.

Were you guys the first to trademark the "Swype" name? It seems to be the best and most authentic sounding name for such a product.

Happy to say yes. We created the brand in 2008 right before we launched the company. Very proud of it!

Hi Aaron, huge Swype fan here.I've tried a heck of a lot of swiping keyboards but always returned to Swype. Are there any plans to implement a Swype to space feature similar to swiftkey flow? That's the only feature missing from Swype as far as I'm concerned. Actually, a word stretcher like kii has would also be awesome.

Thanks!

Thanks FizzyG! We certainly have looked at ways in which you can extend the Swype path through words. Having to go through 'space' is sub-optimal since it really is faster and more accurate to just lift and re-start the new word.

I honestly agree with you. It's just like people playing Dance Dance Revolution and moving their feet back to the center after every step. You might have an easier time standing up while you're a beginner, but you'll never get fast at DDR ;-)

Thanks CaptainShanks! I like that answer so much, I'm adding "CaptainShanks" to our English Dictionary :-)

I prefer Swype in almost every way, but use Swiftkey more often because the keypress vibration is gentler. Swype is like an earthquake in my hand.

I hate to turn this AMA into a bunch of feature requests but... just saying.

That is totally ok! We like feature requests. This is super dependent on the device you use. We actually just fire an ON-OFF sequence and the timing of that determines the strength. We have shortened that length significantly in the Google Play version. What device are you using and which version of Swype?

Hey Guys,

first of all, I really love Swype, I never used anything else since I got my SGS 1. And thank you for the nice Swype Shirt.

I don't have a question but rather a small remark:

It would be great if you yould slightly adjust the keyboard layout when the numbers-and-special-character mode is activated: the keys beneath the space bar should be , and . just like in the normal mode. It was like that in an earlyer version and it made typing numbers or dates way easier. As it is now, I have to either switch back and forth between both modes or have to stay in the normal mode and long-press the keys which have the numbers assigned to them. Pretty inconvenient in my opinion. But it's just a slight flaw, nothing bad.

HT - glad you like the shirt, and we like your feedback as well. We're constantly playing with the simplicity of layouts vs the added functionality of "more keys"

PLEASE for the love of god enable emoji support please!

I know! Working on it!

why is there no option to purchase with paypal like whatsapp? you force people to pirate your stuff, but would buy if they could, in countries, where creditcards are not common!

Good point. We'll look into it, in app purchasing is in our future which may be the way here......

Favourite Android phone and why

Squeezing this one in as I run out the door... unlocked GS3 with no bloatware!

Hi Aaron, i used to love swype but when you changed the way to choose between languages, it became way slower, and yes i can type in english and spanish in a same sentence, can't you make something like it was before or as swype that automatically detects the language without the need of be choosing in which language to write? that's be my only complain. thanks for your attention.

Zapika - you can switch languages quickly by Swype:ing from the Swype key to the space bar. So that works today. Insofar as simultaneous bi-lingual support.....it is coming very soon!

What's your thoughts on Minuum as a competitor? Do you see it as a threat to Swype, and all the other keyboards around?

Well, I love innovation which is where we came up with Swype in the first place.....but honestly I haven't played with it yet so I'll reserve judgement.

Thumb mode in landscape on tablet. Why there is so much wasted space in the middle? Just put numbers in there. Also .com button should personalize with the language.

jasp - yep! We've had the same idea ourselves. Could be cool to do the transparency there if we could get more control over that from Android OS - maybe on a fork. Thanks for the feedback!

Did you just announce that you are forking Android?

I wish. That would be super fun to do.

How many of those cool little Swype fingers have been made? I think they're awesome and wish I had one ;) Love Swype been on since the beta on my HTC Hero.

that would be a great trivia question..... you've just come up with our next FB contest. And for that, you get a free finger!

free 'foam' finger I mean :-)

Hey, Swype user here on a Galaxy SIII / ICS. Love it, and I'm on beta 1.3 now. Are there going to be free full versions for long time beta users? AND - how can I get a shirt?! Poor college student :(

WARNING MARKETING SPIEL: We run contests from time to time giving away shirts. Another way is to visit us in Seattle. Another way is to become our favorite Twitter follower <g>

Where are you guys in Seattle?

505 1st Ave S! Suite 700!

I love Swype to bits - especially that it's the only keyboard where password is swypable if stored.

However, one major papercut on every keyboard out there is the inability to effectively autofill passwords and forms. Any chance of a Lastpass add-on that works natively from within Swype?

That idea is too good to even comment on. :-)

Did Swype ever used to automatically insert a space after punctuation marks? I feel like it did; but doesn't anymore...am I remembering wrong?

If you do the Punct Gestures, like ?-'space' then you get the automatically insert the space. But we never did true auto spacing after punct. because the rule set for that auto insertion just gets crazy between URL's concatenated words, email addresses, etc

I've only been using swype for a day...but want to thank you and your team for creating this absolutely incredible keyboard. You've made typing on my tablet so much more easy and enjoyable... now I just need to find a way to buy it... anywhere accepts PayPal for apps?

hp - thanks! Based on your question, and a few other similar ones, we're looking at how to do that.

When Swype became a part of Nuance, did the direction and updates Swype had change at all or has Swype been running without much intervention by the parent company?

Well, we've benefited a lot from a larger team. Also, the original T9 and XT9 technology came from the same group that made Swype so it was a bit of a re-union. "Getting the band back together" we called it.....

Can I be the assistant to the Vice President of Swype?

Yes...wait...maybe....hmm...can I see your resume? :-)

Thought this AMA was Ally Sheedy and got excited.

Nevermind. Carry on.

Many times I've been sorry not to be Ally Sheedy.

Speaking of which what is the name of the movie supposed to be a breakfast club remake?

Breakfast Club at Tiffany's?

Is there a possibility for two finger swype in the future?

Y'know, we have thought about that but there are a couple of complicating factors.

1) How smart do you have to be to actually input like this accurately and well?
2) The ambiguity problem would be tremendous since you would have multiple paths running simultaneously and you'd have to do some processor intensive logic to determine whether a single path was a new work or a part of an existing word.

Not impossible, but pretty hard and I (personally) question the usability of the end result.

What do you think omjviv? Do you really think you could Swype quickly with both hands?

I just wanted to say that I held off on buying an Android tablet until swype beta was available for tablets, and you could make the keyboard smaller and use it with just a thumb. I think that's a great feature, and to the best of my knowledge one that's still only available on Swype, even though there are lots of other players in slide-to-type keyboards. Hope you guys are advertising it.

Thanks RPA - I do love that teeny tiny keyboard myself. Especially when doing form filling so I can see the rest of the screen.

Is there a way for beta users to transfer the dictionary to the purchased product? I was disappointed when I bought swype and it didn't pick up my extensive dictionary from the beta I have been using for a while.

If you registered for Back Up and Sync, it should transfer just fine. Is it not working for you?

Don't know aything about Back UP and Sync or Sype Connect. Just downloaded the beta over a year ago and have been using it (and updating it) ever since. I will look in the settings of the beta

Yeah, once you register for that you should be good to sync it to any Android device.

I have to say I'm very impressed by this latest version on the Play Store. You won me back. I was an advocate of using Google's real time voice, but I'm finding DD to be fast as all hell too. So that's no longer an issue. I think a majority of the people bitching about that voice transcribing haven't tried the latest version that thoroughly. It's quite impressive, especially for this low price.

What's the non-sale price going to be for Swype?

Thanks bobdle, I've been getting a lot of questions about DD vs GV so appreciate you sharing your positive experience.

On the non-sale price, honestly - we're going to wait and see how things go. Personally, I'm loving the big numbers (Top 7 paid app of ALL TIME....after only 30 hours of being live) so I want to keep the volume cranked. Stay tuned.

Looking back at your career since then, do you regret having starred in "St. Elmo's Fire"?

No, I think Maid to Order was the mistake.....

I want to be able to remove words from the default dictionary. Not words that I've added but normal words that I never use that interfere with other common words. Like "fir". Can Swype make that happen?

Also, you mad at Google? The Android keyboard is pretty nice now..

You can "suppress" the word by highlighting the word in the word choice list and then press and hold on it. This effectively deletes it but not really...because you might want to write "I love your Douglas Fir" at some point in the future.

I haven't had to yet :)

Thanks for the reply! I used Swype beta for a long time but since have moved onto the stock Android KB but I did buy Swype yesterday.

Cool. Let us know what you think.... I hope it's the best version yet!

First off I'd like to say as a user of Swype Beta for a long time I love the keyboard and how far it has come (in fact it's one of the reasons I bought the Galaxy S). Thanks for such a great product. The biggest advancement I was stoked to see was dictionary sync across all my devices...are there any plans to add anything else that we should be completely hyped about?

Yes. :-)

Realized I didn't hit "Reply" on this one... sorry dtseiler, replying now! :-)

Will there be an option again to remove complete words, rather than only the last written word and then per letter? Or am I missing something in setting up Swype that enables this (older style behaviour)?

Yeah - this has in fact been re-introduced in the Google Play version. Honestly we see a 50/50 split on this single character delete vs full word delete so the debate will rage on.....until we make it a setting <g>

I really hope you come back in here & still answer questions. I have 2.

Why did you reduce the functionality of the symbols & edit screens? Back when it was version 3.6, both had way more buttons, now they aren't as useful.

3.6 screens: img1 & img2
1.4/1.5 screens: img1 & img2

Also, why is the tablet version of 1.5 way bigger than 1.4 was?
smaller 1.4 & bigger 1.5

full album of screenshots?

xnifex. Those are good questions.

Edit Layer: Several of those functions are just really hard to implement across devices, especially as Google made OS changes....so we dumped them.

In both the Symbols + Edit layer it was also pruning for ease of use. Page up, Page Down, the Euro, Parens....just weren't getting much user and they were taking space away from the super high usage keys, Arrows, etc.

The toughest thing is to make something simpler - because you feel like you are reducing your functionality. And while in the strictest terms you are, for a broad spectrum of users the simplicity makes a bigger difference.

For the size question, 1.5 treats 7" Devices like a Tablet...so it gets the tablet UI rather than the Phone UI. We add a few more buttons that we think aids the tablet use case. Also, it supports split screen and mini version so you can use the latter if you like the smallest Swype:able size.

Hope this gets you what you want, again...good Q's

Thank you for the best Android keyboard! I've tried a few others, but I always returned to Swype almost immediately.

I think you should pay some more attention to users' feedback concerning languages other than English, though. In European Portuguese (I'm not sure if the same applies to the Brazilian version), for instance, there's a bug that has remained unfixed for a long time: If you Swype from the letter "o" to the space bar, instead of the word "o" (meaning "the" in English, so you can imagine its frequency) appearing, double quotes appear in its place. A few versions ago, you could also Swype "er" for "é" (because we also have "e" as a separate word), but it's no longer the case.

Sukigu, great feedback. I've passed it along to the linguistics team....always looking for good feedback in other languages. We're proud of our language support but recognize there is always room for improvement!

Hey actually! This has been fixed in EU and BR Portuguese in the latest Google Play version....check it out and let me know if it's better.

Swype is the reason I am able to effectively do many things I used to do exclusively on a real computer! I'm really glad you decided to be available through the play store :) Also, the possibility to store the custom dictionary in the cloud makes switching between devices significantly less annoying!

I have a question/feature request: I use two languages frequently, and switching between them was more difficult than with other keyboards. Then I discovered the gesture (swiping from 'swype' button to space switches to the last used language). But for it to work, you need to switch "manually" first. Would it be possible to make it just cycle through enabled languages? At least as an optional behaviour that could be configured in settings? Thanks!

sjakub, we've actually done it both ways in the past...but having the user do it manually, one time, helps to set it up cognitively. But I see your point. As we move to add better multilingual support, we'll probably revisit this feature and UX

Thanks for the reply :)

I don't mind having to do it once, but it has to be re-done every time I reboot the phone (which I do quite often)... which means I can't just assume that it's going to work, because sometimes it doesn't and it slows me down ;)

Ah. Got it. That SHOULD persist across reboot. We'll take a look. Thanks.

Well sir, as a fellow Sheedy I do have some questions. Unfortunately none of them being related to your work. But should you see this and be willing to answer family lineage questions, I do have a few for ya!

Hah, definitely. My father has been dutifully tracking us all down in one of those genealogy sites so I might have to rope him in on this questions <g>

Been a user since the very early beta days and also been a Dragon user for 15 years so am happy to see the integration. I like to put things "in quotes" and (parentheses) a lot. It's hard to do that with Swype! Any chance of having the "long press" followed by a word grab that character (quote or parenthesis ... see, I'm using it still :-) in some way? Also - the "speaking" part doesn't seem to allow either of these characters to be inserted, who do we complain to about that?

We were just discussing this last night actually. A better quote-endquote gesture would be very cool. Thanks for re-igniting the debate here internally. People are throwing air quotes around behind me. :-)

I have inbuilt Swype. So I won't be able to update for any new features?

The version on Google Play can install next to your OEM pre-install, and the GP version will update regularly.

What exactly is in store for Swype Beta now?

He wasn't replying properly, but this was his reply to you:

"Swype Beta will become more of a "true" Beta. We'll release A/B UX test versions, languages that are still in development but needing native speaker feedback, etc"

Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1d3x5i/i_am_aaron_sheedy_vp_of_swype_at_nuance_ask_me/c9mmtqo

Thanks for catching that, kelvinyap9!

Will Sprint customers that have Swype already bundled on their phones be able to get updates from the Play Store? Right now the Store doesn't recognize it as installed.

FWIW I have a Samsung Galaxy SIII

Swype from the Play store will get updates, but this won't affect any pre-installed version of Swype... after we deliver to an OEM, updates will be handled through their own release cycle with a wireless carrier.

If we were to buy Swype from the Play Store, how would that jive with an OEM-installed Swype?

Yes! You can install side by side with any other version of Swype if you'd like.