Nuance to Buy Virtual Keyboard-Maker Swype for $100 Million

Nuance, a voice recognition technology company, has acquired Seattle-based Swype, which is known for its very popular virtual keyboard commonly found on Android phones, according a person close to the situation. A source pegged the deal size at more than $100 million, but less that $150 million. The company was not reachable for comment. The deal was first reported by Uncrunched, but I was able to confirm it separately. The acquisition is expected to be announced tomorrow by Nuance, a publicly held company that has a market value of nearly $7 billion. [UPDATE: Here it is. Total price: $102.5 million. Swype was co-founded by Cliff Kushler, who previously worked at Tegic Communications, which is known for developing T9, the predictive text software that is now owned by Nuance. As touchscreen phones became more popular, the predictive texting that eliminated triple-tapping became less necessary, as new forms of input on a piece of glass became mandatory. Nuance bought the technology from AOL.

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