History
The court dismissed a claim that Eatoni Ergonomics came into being in the Spring 1998 as an orally agreed partnership between Howard Gutowitz, David A. Kosower and Eugene Skepner; the former pair having met as social acquaintances and Skepner noted for programming skills. The Eatoni project had the objective of developing reduced size keypads for portable devices. By August 1999 Kosower stopped working on the project due to a disagreements with Gutowitz over terms for setting up the new company and patents Gutowitz had or intended to file which was eventually to result in a subsequent lawsuit. In September 1999 Gutowitz went on to form Delaware limited liability company, Eatoni Ergonomics LLC and on 16 February 2000 formed theLetterwise
Design
Unlike most if not all other predictive text entry systems, LetterWise does not depend on a work dictionary but is a prefix based predictive system. For each letter in the word the user taps the key associated with that letter on the keypad. If the letter chosen is the one required the user simply repeats the process for the next letter in the word, other ''Next'' is tapped until the required letter appears. It is claimed this is a very simple and efficient system to use, with noExample
*Entering the word sirs which is a word with biases LetterWise strongly. A Multi-tap timeout will typically be one to two seconds wait for the cursor to move to the next letter but this can be interrupted by tapping the ''timeout kill'' or ''advance'' button (often ''down''). A word such as ''mama'' would be more favourable to Multi-tap where 4 taps and no timeouts would be required; far less than the 14 taps and 1 timeout required for ''sirs''.Software app versions
Despite not included as a system keyboard, LetterWise was available in Email / Twitter / SMS / LiveJournal clients for Symbian, iOS as well as Qualcomm's BREW platform (distributed by the Verizon Wireless Get It Now service).Performance
Performance figures for predictive text examples typically depend on use of natural language. Use ofMemory / storage requirements
Eatoni engineers claim LetterWise has relatively low storage requirements compared to dictionary based solutions. The Eatoni website claims in the storage space typically required for a single dictionary database (30–100kb) it would be possible to fit LetterWise databases for 10–20 different languages. The website says deviceExperimental work
LetterWise was also used in TongueWise, a tongue-computer interface for tetraplegics using the LetterWiseChinese LetterWise
The Chinese LetterWise is can be loosely described a two-level version of alphabetic LetterWise. A phonetic character (e.g.WordWise
Eatoni Ergonomics also developed and patented the dictionary word based predictive text input system WordWise announcing it in September 2000 with claims it was even faster than LetterWise. Wigdor and Balakrishnan indicated WordWise performs similarly to earlier techniques but with subtle advantages, though as with all predictive techniques the efficiency relied essentially upon the use of natural language with techniques such as abbreviations tending to nullify any advantage. In addition to the standard version of WordWise Eatoni's website also notes they developed a more advanced version termed ''shift WordWise''. ''Shift-WordWise'' required use of a modified ''CHELNSTY keypad'' with those letters being selected by aAdoption
Despite intensive marketing attempts in the early 2000s LetterWise and WordWise were not widely adopted by cell phone manufacturers with the Multi-tap and T9 system holding the market. LetterWise did find some adoption forNotes and references
Notes
References
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