funkfeuer.net

T9 - Text on 9 Keys - our friend that makes entering text into phones less painful by predicting words you want to write still has many issues. The folks at MobHappy just resent T9 in a recent post for not having a proper dictionary of common words that are used in spoken language.

I am having a different problem. T9 provides multi language support but it seems that nobody has thought about users that communicate in more than one language.

What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks one language? American.

To me it seems to be clear - sorry guys - that Nuance, the company that is licensing T9 to the mobile device makers such as Nokia, Sony Ericsson, LG and others must be an American company because it doesn’t appear as if they have thought about such problems at all.

The so-called predictive text cannot even predict the language I want to write in. In 9 out of 10 times I reply to an SMS that has been sent to me or I select the recipient first, and afterwards that I want to send a text message. Hence, my mobile phone should know with whom I want to communicate and the language I want to use based on previous conversations. Each time I send a message to Twitter or a friend abroad I have to switch the language from German to English and back again. In this case I am incredibly happy in that I forgot all the French I learned in school and therefore only have to cope with two languages.

This could be so much easier. The phone could remember the language I use for each of my contacts. Additionally, when writing a message to a new unknown phone number a prediction of the language based on the country code could make sense. If I am texting to the U.S. (+1) or UK (+44), why not quickly ask me if I want to write in English?

T9 is incredibly bad in this regard.

But apologies to Nuance because fortunately somebody is thinking about such problems. They claim that in their latest predictive text system XT9 it is, besides other improvements, possible to easily switch languages while writing. Two dictionaries can be used at the same time, which should help most people like me that are writing in two languages.

XT9 has been introduced on the 3GSM World Congress in 2006 and in 2007 it has been announced that XT9 is going mainstream and not only Windows Mobile devices are supported anymore. However, adoption seems to be low and I didn’t find many current devices supporting XT9.

I am happy a solution is on the way but it will take more time until XT9 is broadly available.

Can I look forward to have this in my next device? Is it really better than T9? If somebody tried XT9 already it would be great if you could provide some details in the comments.