Interesting but highlights the obvious problems.
The ABCs of Keypad Logic With a Stroke, Tegic Simplifies the Cell Phone
Spelling System
By Mike Mills
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 15, 1999; Page F21
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.
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.
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.
The 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.
"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.
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.
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."
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
Was in to CANTEL/AT&T today, in Waterloo, Ont. - they still do not have the RIM pager.
Due to arrive in about 10 days.
There has been a lot of people asking for RIM's pager there.
Ron |
