  We consider an information updating system where an information provider and
an information receiver engage in an update process over time. Different from
the existing literature where updates are countable (hard) and take effect
either immediately or after a delay, but $instantaneously$ in both cases, here
updates start taking effect right away but $gradually$ over time. We coin this
setting $soft$ $updates$. When the updating process starts, the age decreases
until the soft update period ends. We constrain the number of times the
information provider and the information receiver meet (number of update
periods) and the total duration of the update periods. We consider two models
for the decrease of age during an update period: In the first model, the rate
of decrease of age is proportional to the current age, and in the second model,
the rate of decrease of age is constant. The first model results in an
exponentially decaying age, and the second model results in a linearly decaying
age. In both cases, we determine the optimum updating schemes, by determining
the optimum start times and optimum durations of the updates, subject to the
constraints on the number of update periods and the total update duration.
