New Swype keyboard for Android crowd-sources your autocorrections

The market for Android keyboards is remarkably heated and fast moving, with companies cribbing different features from each other seemingly every month. The latest such move comes from Swype, which is adding a feature called "Living Language" that ostensibly is in the same ballpark as SwiftKey's natural language prediction. Where SwiftKey creates dictionaries and predictions based on a global linguistic analysis, Nuance's Swype is crowd-sourcing its dictionaries. If you opt-in, your predictions will come thanks to a crowd-sourced dictionary that analyses everybody's typing habits. Swype promises to deliver "trending words and phrases in real-time," so you won't have to manually add "YOLO" to your dictionary.

In addition, Swype is adding a clever new way to fix up your words long after you've typed them. Dubbed "Smart Editor," it automatically underlines words in a sentence it thinks you might want to change. In our brief time with a beta version of the device, it didn't guess which words were incorrect very often. However, that's a feature that's intended to learn as you use it, so it should get better over time. Unfortunately, performance on this beta wasn't especially inspiring either, but we imagine by the time it's officially released it should be back to its traditional speed. If you're interested in giving it a shot, Nuance has the beta up on its site.