Much smoother? Don't make me laugh. Swiss German sounds like continually clearing your throat. You may be thinking of Austrian German.

Swiss German is so far from actual German (by which I mean "High German", the artificial language used in media and taught to non-native speakers in school) that TV interviews or reports which are in Swiss German are subtitled in German when broadcast in Germany. Otherwise there's next to no hope for a native speaker of German to understand it.

The same, incidentally, is true for many of the stronger dialects within Germany, too. If a speaker of a certain dialect, say, Saxon, Swabian or Bavarian, really lets it get away with him or just talks to someone from the very same area, then an outsider from more than a hundred kilometers away will usually fail to understand it.

I sometimes have problems trying to understand such people even when they talk High German, because their dialect has a strong influence on the way they speak the "standard" version.

Here's a video on the subject:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If8H3-FsVjQ

The caption at the end says "Over 80 million Germans do not know Swiss German". And I have to say that the version spoken in the video is sanitized so that it is possible to understand it mostly. Though the sign shown within the video would have me baffled as well.