What's the biggest barrier preventing pocket phones from being used as e-mail devices? It's those dreaded touch-tone alpha-numeric keypads. Sure, punching in a phone number is simple. But spelling out words is a headache, with each number key responsible for three letters -- ABC, DEF, GHI, etc.
Let's spell "CALL ME" on my Sony cell phone: To get to the letter "C" I have to hit number 2 three times (to advance from "A" to "B" to "C"). Letter "A" also is on number 2, press once. The letter "L" requires three presses on number 5, etc. That's 13 total pushes of the buttons, not counting waiting for the cursor to move to the next letter.
And that's just for two measly words. Imagine writing an entire e-mail message that way.
Some have tried cramming a full QWERTY keyboard into a wireless phone. The Nokia 9000 has a clamshell design that opens to reveal a small screen and keyboard. The result is a phone that's too big and a keyboard that's too small.
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A small, privately held Seattle company called Tegic Communications has found a way around the problem, not by abandoning the touch-tone keypad, which now is the most ubiquitous information entry system in the world, but by embracing it and making it faster.
Tegic, founded by a trio of linguists whose previous work involved making it easier for the disabled to communicate, has developed advanced linguistic databases that vastly speed the process of spelling out words on a touch-tone keypad.
Its product, called T9 (after the nine buttons on a phone that spell the alphabet), is being rapidly adopted by cell phone equipment makers and will appear on many popular-branded phones in the next year. Nokia OY, Motorola Inc., Mitsubishi Corp., Sony Corp., Samsung Co., Philips Electronics NV and others already have signed on. Several phones at last week's wireless industry trade show in New Orleans were using T9.
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T9 allows users to simply spell out the words they want by hitting each button once, without repeatedly hitting each key to advance to the correct letter.
So rather than the six button pushes required to spell the word "HOW" (hitting the number 4 twice to advance to the "H," the number six three times to get to "O" and the number 9 once to get to "W"), the user simply hits 4,6,9. The computer chip inside the phone figures out you're going after "HOW" and sorts out the correct letters for you.
Like the old joke about the Thermos container that keeps hot things hot and cold things cold, you may wonder: "How do it know?"
It's all about writing software that factors in the most frequently used words in any language, said William Valenti, Tegic's executive vice president of business development.
Share this articleShareThe T9, he said, decodes or -- I love this word -- "disambiguates" the keystrokes to make a highly educated guess of what you're trying to spell.
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"It's a set of rules on how words are made," Valenti said. The software "sorts through millions of words" from the Internet, and ranks those that are most commonly used. "It's a living database that reflects how people use text." But what if it's wrong? What if you're trying to spell "HOME" and it comes out "GOOD" (both are 4663)? Or "ME" and you get "OF" (both are 63)? In those cases, you would hit the arrow key on the keypad to move to the next-most likely word: It ranks "GOOD" as more often used than "HOME," and "OF" before "ME." It still saves strokes: Spelling "HOME" without T9 requires eight button pushes, with T9 it's five.
The technology works for more than just English. It's also available for Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. More languages are scheduled, including Chinese, Finnish and Japanese.
Tegic struggles with issues like whether to write software that puts word combinations in their grammatical context, rather than a popularity ranking, so that ME would naturally follow a verb like CALL, rather than OF.
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So far, the company has refrained from employing such "context analysis" in English. "It's better not to change words dynamically," but instead to rank them only according to their frequency of use, Valenti said.
But grammatical context has been crucial to adapting T9 technology to the Chinese language. The Chinese State Language and Character Commission in November certified Tegic's character-recognition technology, making Tegic the first Western company to win such status. Other Western companies had attempted to graft Chinese characters according to Latin-root equivalents, which the Chinese rejected as "culturally insulting," said Valenti, a former Chinese translator.
Chinese languages, like most East Asian languages, don't readily lend themselves to word processing and e-mail. The multitude of Chinese characters don't fit on small, portable devices -- and each character itself requires eight to 10 keystrokes. Tegic cuts the process down to a few strokes. Depending on context, for some words used in combination with others, the writer might not need to enter any strokes at all. Five phone makers so far have licensed the Chinese language version, Valenti said.
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Tegic has patents on this approach, he said, which puts the company in a strong position to create a new standard for typing in e-mail messages on the run. Tegic also is marketing non-phone applications, such as software that creates a touch-pad on the screen of Palm personal organizers. That may irritate geeks who pride themselves in being fluent at the Palm's pen-based shorthand, but the masses may prefer it.
Tegic has 50 employees and offices next to Seattle's Pike Place Market. The company has been through three rounds of funding, the first two at $300,000-$400,000 each from angel investors. A third round of financing is underway that includes venture capital.
Tegic's founders haven't forgotten their initial focus. They now have grants from the National Institutes of Health to adapt T9 technology for people with disabilities. Soon it will show up in wheelchair text-input devices and eyeglasses that allow people to stare at holographic letters in the lenses and blink to type characters onto a computer screen, Valenti said.
"We're all disabled when it comes to typing letters on a numeric keypad," Valenti said. The T9 technology simply allows users to make the best use of "a universal interface that's always going to be there." Mike Mills's e-mail address is millsm@washpost.com CAPTION: Tegic's T9 Keypad allows users to spell out words by hitting each button only once. ec
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