After a seemingly never ending beta period, Nuance Communications released the Swype keyboard app into the Google Play Store in late-April. While the Play Store version of the app should have been familiar to anyone that had been using the beta release, it did come with a price to pay. Specifically, the Swype app arrived priced at $0.99. And while we suspect some long time beta users may have had a hard time paying, there is one perk that has come as a result of parting with that dollar.
The perk is updates. Simply put, it is nice to have the updates managed by way of the Google Play Store. You get the notification and updating is pretty painless. With that in mind, Nuance has just recently rolled out an updated release. This latest update has arrived as version 1.5.6.16542 and perhaps more important than the long string of numbers — there are some decent improvements and fixes.
The folks at Swype have said the Dragon Dictation UI has been improved and the next word prediction accuracy has been improved. Two decent perks right there, however those using the Mail app on an HTC One will also have a fix for the word duplication issues. Additionally, there was also mention of unspecified user reported crash issues having been fixed along with other bug fixes and optimizations.
The list of available themes has also grown by one with this latest update. Those looking to switch up the keyboard theme can head to Settings -> Language and Input and then clicking the gear icon to the right of the Swype + Dragon keyboard option. From here you click Settings (top option in the list) and then choose the option for Themes (also on top). The default is likely set to Holo, however there are plenty of options to include Arctic, Silver and Night as well as the Classic layout. In total there are now 14 themes.
Additionally, this update has also added support for new languages as well as brought updated language databases for several other languages. The new languages include; Afrikaans, Irish, Javanese, Sesotho, Sundanese, Swahili, Xhosa and Zulu. The updated language databases include; French, German, Italian, Spanish and Russian. With that, those who have already purchased Swype will get this update for free. For those who have yet to try Swype and are afraid to part with the buck, there is a trial available in the Google Play Store as “Swype Keyboard Trial.”
SOURCE: Google Play Store
