T9 (predictive Text)
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T9 is a
predictive text Predictive text is an input technology used where one key or button represents many letters, such as on the Telephone keypad, numeric keypads of mobile phones and in accessibility technologies. Each key press results in a ''prediction'' rather ...
technology for
mobile phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whil ...
s (specifically those that contain a 3×4 numeric keypad), originally developed by Tegic Communications, now part of
Nuance Communications Nuance Communications, Inc. is an American multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, that markets speech recognition and artificial intelligence software. Nuance merged with its compe ...
. T9 stands for ''Text on 9 keys.'' T9 was used on phones from
Verizon Verizon Communications Inc., commonly known as Verizon, is an American multinational telecommunications conglomerate and a corporate component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company is headquartered at 1095 Avenue of the Americas in ...
,
NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. The company was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited, before rebranding in 1983 as NEC. It provides IT and network soluti ...
,
Nokia Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj, referred to as Nokia) is a Finnish multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications industry, telecommunications, technology company, information technology, and consumer electronics corporatio ...
,
Samsung Electronics Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (, sometimes shortened to SEC and stylized as SΛMSUNG) is a South Korean multinational corporation, multinational electronics corporation headquartered in Yeongtong-gu, Suwon, South Korea. It is the pinnacle of ...
,
Siemens Siemens AG ( ) is a German multinational conglomerate corporation and the largest industrial manufacturing company in Europe headquartered in Munich with branch offices abroad. The principal divisions of the corporation are ''Industry'', '' ...
,
Sony Mobile Sony Mobile Communications Inc. ( ja, ソニーモバイルコミュニケーションズ株式会社) was a multinational telecommunications company founded on October 1, 2001, as a joint venture between Sony Group Corporation and Ericsson. I ...
,
Sanyo , stylized as SANYO, is a Japanese electronics company and formerly a member of the Fortune Global 500, ''Fortune'' Global 500 whose headquarters was located in Moriguchi, Osaka, Moriguchi, Osaka prefecture, Japan. Sanyo had over 230 subsidiari ...
, SAGEM and others, as well as
PDA PDA may refer to: Science and technology * Patron-driven acquisition, a mechanism for libraries to purchase books *Personal digital assistant, a mobile device * Photodiode array, a type of detector * Polydiacetylenes, a family of conducting poly ...
s such as Avigo during the late 1990s. The main competing technologies include
iTap iTap is a predictive text technology developed for mobile phones, developed by Motorola employees as a competitor to T9. It was designed as a replacement for the old letter mappings on phones to help with word entry. This makes some of the mode ...
created by
Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American Multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, United States. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, the company split into two independent p ...
, SureType created by RIM, Eatoni's
LetterWise LetterWise and WordWise were predictive text entry systems developed by Eatoni Ergonomics (Eatoni) for handheld devices with ambiguous keyboards / keypads, typically non-smart traditional cellphones and portable devices with keypads. All patents ...
and WordWise, and Intelab's Tauto. T9 is not available on Apple devices but is available on certain inexpensive phones without a touchscreen, and modern Android phones where it can be used to dial contacts by spelling the name of the contact one is trying to call. The technology was protected by multiple US patents, but they have since expired.


Design

T9's objective is to make it easier to enter
text message Text messaging, or texting, is the act of composing and sending electronic messages, typically consisting of alphabetic and numeric characters, between two or more users of mobile devices, desktops/ laptops, or another type of compatible comput ...
s. It allows words to be formed by a single keypress for each letter, which is an enormous improvement over the
multi-tap Multi-tap (multi-press) refers to a text entry system for mobile phones. The alphabet is printed under each key (beginning on "2") in a three-letter sequence as follows; ABC under 2 key, DEF under 3 key, etc. Exceptions are the "7" key, which ...
approach used in conventional mobile phone text entry at the time, in which several letters are associated with each key, and selecting one letter often requires multiple keypresses. T9 combines the groups of letters on each phone key with a fast-access
dictionary A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by radical and stroke for ideographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies ...
of words. It will then look up in the dictionary all words corresponding to the sequence of keypresses and order them by frequency of use. As T9 "gains familiarity" with the words and phrases the user commonly uses, it speeds up the process by offering the most frequently used words first and then letting the user access other choices with one or more presses of a predefined "Next" key. The dictionary is expandable. After introducing a new word, the next time the user tries to produce that word, T9 adds it to the predictive dictionary. The user database (UDB) can be expanded via
multi-tap Multi-tap (multi-press) refers to a text entry system for mobile phones. The alphabet is printed under each key (beginning on "2") in a three-letter sequence as follows; ABC under 2 key, DEF under 3 key, etc. Exceptions are the "7" key, which ...
. The implementation of the user database is dependent on the version of T9 and how T9 is actually integrated on the device. Some phone manufacturers supply a permanent user database, while others do so for the duration of the session.


Features

Some T9 implementations feature ''smart punctuation''. This feature allows the user to insert sentence and word punctuation using the '1'-key. Depending on the context, smart punctuation inserts sentence punctuation (period or 'full stop') or embedded punctuation (period or hyphen) or word punctuation (apostrophe in can't, won't, isn't, and the possessive '' 's''). Depending on the language, T9 also supports word breaking after punctuation to support
clitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a w ...
s such as ''l' '' and ''n' ''in French and '' 's'' in English. The UDB is an optional feature that allows words that were explicitly entered by the user to be stored for future reference. The number of words stored depend on the implementation and the language. In later versions of T9, the order of the words presented is adapted to the usage pattern. For instance, in English, 4663 matches "good", "home", "gone", "hood", etc. Such combinations are known as '' textonyms''; e.g., "home" is referred to as a ''textonym'' of "good". T9 is encoded to prefer the word that its programmers determined to be the most common "textonym", such as "good" over "home" or "gone", "hand" over "game", or "bad" over "cad" or "ace". When the user tends to use "home" more often than "good", eventually the two words switch position, and "home" is presented as the default option instead. Information about common word combinations can also be learned and stored for future predictions (so, "I'm feeling" followed by 4663 will be offered as "good" instead of "home", whereas "I went back" and 4663 would be "home", not "good"). For words entered by the user,
word completion Autocomplete, or word completion, is a feature in which an application predicts the rest of a word a user is typing. In Android and iOS smartphones, this is called predictive text. In graphical user interfaces, users can typically press the tab ...
can be enabled. When the user enters matching keypresses, in addition to words and stems, the system also provides completions. In later versions of T9, the user can select a primary and secondary language and access matches from both languages. This enables users to write messages in their native language, as well as a foreign one. Some implementations learn commonly used word pairs and provide word prediction (e.g. if one often writes "eat food", after entering "eat" the phone will suggest "food", which can be confirmed by pressing Next). T9 can automatically recognize and correct typing/texting errors, by looking at neighboring keys on the keypad to determine an incorrect keypress. For example, the word "testing" is entered with the key combination "8378464". Entering the same number but with two incorrect keypresses of neighboring keys, e.g., "8278494" results in T9 suggesting the words "tasting" (8278464), "testing" (8378464), and "tapping" (8277464).


Algorithm

In order to achieve compression ratios of close to 1 byte per word, T9 uses an optimized
algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specificat ...
that maintains word order and partial words (also known as stems); however, because of this compression, it over-generates words that are sometimes visible as "junk words". This is a side effect of the requirements for small database sizes on the lower end embedded devices.


Examples

On a phone with a numeric keypad, each time a key (1-9) is pressed (when in a text field), the algorithm returns a guess for what letters are most likely for the keys pressed to that point. For example, to enter the word 'the', the user would press 8 then 4 then 3, and the display would display 't' then 'th' then 'the'. If the less-common word 'fore' is intended (3673) the predictive algorithm may select 'Ford'. Pressing the 'next' key (typically the '*' key) might bring up 'dose', and finally 'fore'. If 'fore' is selected, then the next time the user presses the sequence 3673, fore will be more likely to be the first word displayed. If the word "Felix" is intended, however, when entering 33549, the display shows 'E', then 'De', 'Del', 'Deli', and 'Felix.' This is an example of a letter changing while entering words.


Successors

Many smart keyboards now exist, such as
Swype Swype was a virtual keyboard for touchscreen smartphones and tablets originally developed by Swype Inc., founded in 2002, where the user enters words by sliding a finger or stylus from the first letter of a word to its last letter, lifting only be ...
or
Swiftkey Microsoft SwiftKey is a virtual keyboard app originally developed by TouchType for Android and iOS devices. It was first released for Android in July 2010, followed by an iOS release in September 2014 after Apple implemented third-party keyb ...
, that have taken the idea of T9 and married it with the advanced touchscreen technology found in Android phones and iPhones. These advances have made T9 obsolete in newer cellphones for many users, since it is predicated on the use of a keypad with nothing besides numbers, the asterisk and the pound key (known as the hash key in Commonwealth countries). Many features, such as predictive text, have been adopted by and improved by future generations of keyboard software. However, T9 remains viable. For example, those with larger fingertips still use the T9 based keyboard on smartphones for text entry, because key press accuracy increases with the larger screen area per key on a numeric-style 4×3 keyboard. Such T9 formats for text entry therefore remain available in all latest
s of August 2020 S, or s, is the nineteenth Letter (alphabet), letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the English alphabet, modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is English alphab ...
iterations of LG keyboards, certain Samsung keyboards, and third party T9 keyboards such as Go keyboard for Androids and Type Nine for iPhones, as shown on this LG V60.


See also

*
XT9 XT9 is a text predicting and correcting system for mobile devices with full keyboards rather than the 3x4 keypad on old phones. It was originally developed by Tegic Communications, now part of Nuance Communications Nuance Communications, In ...
*
LetterWise LetterWise and WordWise were predictive text entry systems developed by Eatoni Ergonomics (Eatoni) for handheld devices with ambiguous keyboards / keypads, typically non-smart traditional cellphones and portable devices with keypads. All patents ...
*
Predictive text Predictive text is an input technology used where one key or button represents many letters, such as on the Telephone keypad, numeric keypads of mobile phones and in accessibility technologies. Each key press results in a ''prediction'' rather ...
*
Telephone keypad A telephone keypad is a keypad installed on a push-button telephone or similar telecommunication device for dialing a telephone number. It was standardized when the dual-tone multi-frequency signaling (DTMF) system was developed in the Bell Syste ...
*
Phoneword Phonewords are mnemonic phrases represented as alphanumeric equivalents of a telephone number. In many countries, the digits on the telephone keypad also have letters assigned. By replacing the digits of a telephone number with the correspondin ...


References

{{reflist


External links


Nuance T9 Customer facing site
Natural language processing User interface techniques Nuance software Input methods for handheld devices