A few months ago, I was caught in a long, dreary meeting, and suddenly realized I had forgotten to send a crucial e-mail that morning. Since my phone has wireless web data, I pulled it out and started frantically writing.
But really--typing on a phone? What a Sisyphean task. I was trying to write "Hello Greg." The phone I owned at the time had "multi-tap" functions, which meant that to get a certain alphabet letter, I had to locate the corresponding number on the keyboard, then hit that key once, twice or three times until the letter appeared. Tapping the "4" button twice got me an "h." I tapped "3" twice to get "e," "5" three times for an "l," and on and on....On the verge of losing my mind, I wondered who designed this system? Franz Kafka?
Things improved quite a bit last month, when I got a new phone with special "T9" typing software. With this system, you hit each key only once and the software tries to figure out what word you're spelling. So hitting 4-3-5-5-6 spells "hello." Fewer keystrokes--which makes writing a short e-mail a slightly less hair-pulling experience.
Why am I telling you this? Because, while typing into phones sounds like a marginal little concern, it's actually central to the fate of wireless web. Wireless companies are increasingly rolling out internet-style services for phones--everything from e-mail to restaurant databases to calendar systems to games. Instant messaging via phones is already sweeping the globe. The number of messages in Europe alone rocketed to an estimated 16 billion per month in December, 2000, up from only four billion in January. And the number of short-message users in North America are projected to rise to 15.2 million by 2004, up from 3.7 million in 2000.
"Cellphones will be data devices more and more. That's just a fact," says Craig Mathias of the Massachusetts-based Farpoint Group, an advisory service for the wireless industry.
This means that the process of entering text into phones--using that crappy nine-button keypad--is utterly crucial. As a result, a new mini-industry has formed to solve the problem. Tiny startups are racing to produce the best software for helping you write a novel--or at least a short memo--on your phone.
The leader in this area is Tegic Communications, which makes the T9 program on my phone. Released in 1997, the software is called "predictive text input," and it works like this: It stores a database of 60,000 of the most common, everyday English words. Then it matches each word to your typing, based on the key patterns. At heart, it's not unlike military cryptanalysis and code breaking: You use the most common, expected words to help "disambiguate" an otherwise cryptic set of numbers.
"With T9, your phone becomes not just a voice device but an information device," says Rick Romatowski, director of product marketing for Tegic. T9 is now so successful and dominant in the market--it's currently used in over 90% of today's phones worldwide--that Tegic was bought last year by America Online.
Mind you, it has its problems. T9 occasionally gets words wrong, since the same number pattern can produce two different words. For example, if you're trying to spell "mote," you'd type 6-6-8-3. But the software picks "note" because it's a more common word. Also, proper names often flummox it--when I try to type "Clive," I get "alive." At first try, Romatowski couldn't get it to spell his last name. But in its defence, he notes that users can train T9 to learn new and idiosyncratic words. Even with the small number of errors, Romatowski says, novices can typically do 11 words a minute with a T9 keyboard (experienced users average 25 words).
Various rival companies are trying to go one step better. The Calgary-based Zi Corporation makes a similar word-guessing program, but can also facilitate downloadable dictionaries with specialized slang--the types of words that T9 might not pick up. "So teenage girls will have a whole set of syntax and words that they'd use that we wouldn't, and you want to allow that," says Zi president Gary Kovacs. "You can type 'wassup homey' in a few keystrokes, no problem."
Yet another competitor argues that this whole paradigm of word-guessing is fundamentally flawed. The LetterWise software from Eatoni Ergonomics Inc., a New York-based startup, doesn't try to match your keystrokes to a word database. Instead, it figures out the word you're typing based on letter groupings. It knows, for example, that "sh" or "th" or "ee" are common letter groupings, so that's probably what you mean if you type 7-4 or 8-4 or 3-3, respectively. By tracking these combinations as you type, LetterWise develops the entire word for you. This means that it can figure out unconventional words--such as "schmooze"--since it doesn't need to know the actual word. It only needs to know that the various letter groupings inside the word make sense.
This idea for tracking letter-groupings came out of the statistics background of Howard Gutowitz, Eatoni's founder and CEO. It's a neatly non-intuitive point: "What you learn is that language isn't made out of words. It's made out of letter combinations," says Gutowitz. He says LetterWise can pack 20 different languages into the same memory size that T9 takes to do one language (roughly 60K and up), which is a big deal, given the tiny memory constraints of phones. And handling multiple languages is a major boon, since all of these companies sell most of their wares overseas, where short-messaging on phones is much more common. Zi's sales, for example, are largely to foreign markets like Korea. But Eatoni--just out of the gate--has yet to make a sale.
Or consider this even wackier idea: Thumbscript Development, a company based in New York, has developed an alphabet that lets you visually draw the shape of each letter on a nine-button keypad. An "A," for example, is done by typing 7-9, which understands it as a rough shape of an "A." On the upside, Thumbscript is extremely easy to learn, and since the software doesn't try to guess or predict words, you don't need to glance up at the screen every few seconds to make sure the typing is going well. "That's a major distraction with T9 and the others," notes Jeffery Smith, Thumbscript's inventor and managing partner. But the software is so totally off-the-charts different from all other approaches that even though Thumbscript was released two years ago, it still only has a few customers. "This is a grassroots thing," Smith admits.
Granted, there are other--possibly better--ways to get text into phones. A few years from now, if phones develop bigger screens or faster processing power, we could start to see voice-recognition programs or pen-based entry systems--much like Palm-based pocket computers. In the meantime, the wireless web will rely on those little nine-button keypads, and the sound of one hand typing. Clive Thompson can be reaches at
WHAT'S NEXT
IN ONE YEAR Around 530 million people use wireless messaging (most users are in Europe). Basic phone-typing software still can't handle proper names. Key in "Clive" and you get "Alive" IN THREE YEARS Wireless messaging has shown significant growth in the U.S. and Canada. Database services such as restaurant look-up sites are common. Typing still isn't perfect, but adaptive learning systems in phones are picking up the quirks of writing. IN FIVE YEARS Data entry into phone is ubiquitous, with 890 million users worldwide. A few phones experiment with voice recognition systems -- none of which work especially well.