Swype Keyboard And Dragon Assistant Coming To Wearables

Nuance this week unveiled several new products at CES 2014 aimed at making it a little easier to input text using wearable tech, be it Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smartwatch or what have you. While it’s still unclear why text input makes sense on a device that generally needs to be paired to a smartphone anyway, you’ll soon have a few more options in the form of the Nuance Swype keyboard and Dragon Mobile Assistant.

It’s unclear yet when the company plans to release the new wearable apps to end-users, but working prototypes were on hand at CES and by most accounts running smoothly on an Omate TrueSmart (incidentally, a standalone smartwatch). According to Android Authority, Swype works faster than Fleksy, but using the small display on a smartwatch to type is nonetheless hard to get comfortable with.    

“Wearable technology marks an important evolution in the way people interact with devices,” said Michael Thompson, executive vice president and general manager, Nuance Mobile in a press statement. “Leveraging our powerful Nuance Cloud Services, we are creating intelligent systems optimized for devices with smaller screens where buttons and menus are not practical, or perhaps even not possible. Wearables were made for voice, natural language understanding, and Swype.”

In addition to the Swype keyboard app, Nuance also released a smartwatch version of its Dragon Mobile Assistant, which allows users to control their wearables via voice commands.

One of the neater features that the company touted was a song-recognition function that works in conjunction with Gracenote. Users simply say “Hello Dragon, what song is this?” and the Dragon Mobile Assistant will pull the pertinent information from the cloud.

“Dragon Mobile Assistant demonstrated on the Omate TrueSmart showcases how intelligent assistants are creating a new generation of wearable devices. The ability to simply speak to the device on your wrist to send emails, text messages, set reminders, and search the web is an incredibly compelling and rich experience that we at Omate are thrilled to work on with Nuance,” said Laurent Le Pen, CEO, Omate.