Swipe typing, China edition

Posted on by Jason Li

Above: TouchPal (触宝)’s promo video for their smartphone swipe-typing technology. Note the (probably unauthorized) Lady Gaga soundtrack.

Francis Pisani over at Winch5 has a feature on TouchPal Cootek, a China born-and-bred smartphone swipe-typing technology. Pisani claims that their keyboard works much better than the Swype that’s offered on Samsung phones. Amongst Cootek’s many features are predictive text (all hail T9!), contextual and location-aware dictionaries, and of course, better Chinese input support. And it’s the last one we’ll dig into here. (For the other features, I recommend watching the embedded video above.) Images taken from their Chinese website, captions by me:

Will autocorrect/account for your pinyin input typos

 

Will let you type one long string of pinyin without breaking after a few syllables

 

Has a mode where you can type the pinyin AND THEN swipe the first stroke of the character (has anyone used this? the mode switching seems strange to me…)

 

Better support for mixed Chinese & English text input

Via Winch5.

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