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Swype just got competition which looks suspiciously similar. A company called Nuance has just revealed their own sliding touch input system that works on a smart phone’s virtual keyboard. Just like Swype, the product called T9 Trace lets you swipe or “trace” a path through the letters you want to use for faster input. The program does have a provision for easy switching back to tap input.

The T9 Trace has multimodal support, meaning it supports 12-key touch screen layouts as well as QWERTY keypads. For those who are not as neat when it comes to swiping letters, the program comes with a “sloppy-type correction” that is able to correct input based on which letters surround the mistyped character. The spell correction goes as far as to correct basic errors such as “I”s before “E”s and double letters (overtyping or under typing). It is also able to predict the intended word based on often used phrases and arranges the words according to which is used the most often.

That is not all the T9 have to offer, with the enhanced word completion and “user added words” features that basically lets you store internet lingo, slang, chat and text phrases easily. It is able to detect email messages and website links as well. Punctuations are automatically added in both tap or trace modes so that speed typists will not have to worry about mistakenly leaving out periods. With the Bilingual input, two languages can be used simultaneously without problems and over 70 languages are recognized by the T9 Trace.

Lastly, the XT9 backup feature lets users back up the word database on their device to be transferred to another. While the T9 Trace does sound pretty extensive on paper, it is looking too much like Swype which already has avid users due to being released for the Motorola CLIQ XT. Perhaps a little interface tweaking is in order? It is kind of hard to differentiate the two.

For more about the T9 Trace, head over to Geek.