How T9 Predictive Text Input Changed Cellphones [Cellphones]

Before smartphones took away keyboards and replaced them with slick touchscreens,T9 was the king of software on mobile devices.The predictive text entry method changed how people composed messages and allowed us to type faster than ever on tiny keyboards.

It gave us a glimpse into an international where phones does not just help people confer with each other from anywhere but in addition allow e-mail and act as instant messaging devices.

Last week, Martin King, 60, some of the inventors behind the T9 input method gave up the ghost in Seattle after a five-year battle with cancer.

The T9 idea came at a time when text messaging was just starting up. But typing these messages on a tiny keyboards full of only a few keys proved to be painful.

T9 or Text on 9 Keys, changed that. It allowed users to enter words by pressing a single key for each letter. Earlier systems had multiple letters associated with each key and users had to pick one of them, requiring two or more taps on the phone keyboard.

T9 also combined groups of letter on each phone key with a dictionary ordered by the frequency of using the word. This let users type faster by throwing up words they used most frequently first and then allowing them to access other choices with the click of a key.

Users may also manually add words to be integrated into the T9 software. (Read this amazingly detailed article on how T9 was born and how it took off.)

T9 transformed how users interacted with their cellphones. It took people beyond just voice calls on cell phones, giving them the facility to type out short messages and longer emails. As a matter of fact, T9 became so popular and widespread it can be still around today.

T9 was born out of the work that King and his co-founder Cliff Kushler did in developing products for folk with disabilities. King had developed a watch-tracking communications device that might lay the root for his company called Tegic Communications in 1995.

As component of their work for the eye tracking device, King and Kushler looked at the most productive option to input text using just a few eye positions. That research became the groundwork for a new variety of text input method called T9.

Tegic was sold to AOL in 1999 for $350 million and in 2007 Nuance Communications purchased the company.

In its beautiful tribute to King, the Techflash blog talks about how King tried to resolve problems:

King had an uncanny ability to take a look at problems from various angles, discovering new the way to solve complex issues, recalled Mason Boswell, a Seattle patent attorney who worked closely with the inventor.

” He would often ask questions that connected two fields in a means I had not considered but that clearly pointed easy methods to interesting innovation,” said Boswell. ” He also had some degree of view five to 10 years into the longer term, excited about devices in a technique that transcended current hardware limitations and going more to what might be common down the road.”

King was diagnosed with cancer five years ago. However it didn’t stop him from starting a new company called Exbiblio .  His co-founder at Tegic, Kushler is now section of an organization called Swype that’s changing text entry on touchscreen phones.

About four billion phones worldwide still use T9 software.

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This post is tagged: communications device, developing products, matter of fact, predictive text, tegic communications, text messaging