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Nuance Communications Inc. (Nasdaq: NUAN) confirmed Tuesday evening it has acquired IBM spinoff ShapeWriter Inc. that makes software allowing mobile device users to type by swiping their hands across a keyboard, rather than hitting individual keys.
Financial terms of the acquisition, which closed in May, were not disclosed. Burlington-based Nuance, which makes speech and image recognition software, said it plans to add the California company’s technology to its T9 product portfolio. The T9 products came to Nuance with its 2007 acquisition from AOL LLC of Seattle software company Tegic Communications and its predictive text software, designed to simplify text-message typing.
The deal for ShapeWriter was first reported Sunday in a New York Times article on Tegic founder Cliff Kushler. Kushler now has a new startup, called Swype Inc., that is pushing to develop software that will perform a similar function to ShapeWriter’s.
The two companies’ products attempt a breakthrough in how users input text into mobile devices, similar to the way the T9 software made possible rapid text messaging using a 12-key phone keypad. Both use software designed to guess which word a user is trying to spell, based on his or her finger movements, sliding across the keyboard.
Nuance itself in March announced a similar technology, called T9 Trace. ShapeWriter’s technology is based on research conducted in the late 1990s at IBM Corp.’s Almaden Research Center.
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