Nuance T9 Trace offers fast touchscreen text like Swype

I’m still partial to physical keyboards myself, but an increasing number of people are turning to touchscreen only devices. They may not necessarily like “tapping” a virtual keyboard, that’s why technology like Nuance T9 Trace is so great.

You simply swipe your finger across the screen to form words rather than tapping on individual letters. Much like conventional T9 predictive text on a numeric keypad, T9 Trace will try its best to predict the word you’re trying to spell, even if your finger-swiping isn’t 100% accurate.

Does that sound familiar? It should. The technology and interface sounds identical to Swype, a predictive touchscreen text keyboard that has already been available for a little while now. Just like T9 Trace, Swype gets you to run a single finger across the screen to spell out your words.

So, what’s the difference? I’m not entirely sure. It is interesting to note, however, that the founder and CTO of Swype also happened to be the co-inventor of the original T9 predictive text system. Check the video of Swype below and see how similar the two are.