Cliff Kushler

Cliff Kushler currently serves as Executive Director for the Continuous Path Foundation, created during the acquisition of Swype by Nuance Communications. In 1987, upon his return from earning a Ph.D. at the University of Tokyo, he joined Prentke Romich Co. to serve as Director of Research in the design and development of AAC devices. As a result of this employment, he met Martin King and Dale Grover, who later became his partners in the co-invention of the T9 text input technology. The original reduced keyboard technology was developed in 1995 as an eight-key keyboard known as “JustType,” and was designed and intended as an input technique for use in AAC applications. T9 was ultimately licensed and installed on over 8 billion phones. Following the acquisition of Tegic by America Online in 1999, he left near the end of 2000 to pursue his own interests. In 2002, Cliff partnered with Randy Marsden and, once again developed an input technology that evolved from work intended to facilitate text input for individuals with severe motor impairments. In this work he was again joined by software developer Mark Illing, developing the original “Swype” continuous path-tracing text input technology that was broadly licensed on Android. He served as the CTO of Swype until it was acquired by Nuance Communications in 2011, where he served as VP of Technology Innovation until retiring in 2015. He is a named inventor on over 200 US patents and numerous corresponding international patents. Although both T9 and Swype were extremely successful as cell phone input technologies, neither JustType nor Swype were ever broadly utilized to benefit the non-speaking and motor-impaired individuals for whom they were originally created. The Continuous Path Foundation on which he now serves is dedicated to the transfer of these technologies to fulfill their original purpose.

ASHA Financial Disclosures:
Cliff Kushler receives occasional financial compensation for his work from Continuous Path Foundation, where he is the Executive Director.

ASHA Non-Financial Disclosures:
Cliff Kushler is the lead developer of the JustType application that he is developing with the support of Continuous Path Foundation.