Tegic Communications

» see tegic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

T9 was on every phone I owned between roughly 2001 and 2008, and I never once thought about where it came from. It came from disability research. The work started in 1987 as an attempt to let people who could not speak or use a keyboard write with eye tracking, and the core problem was the same one a phone has: too few inputs, too many letters, so the machine has to guess. By 1995 the guessing engine had been pointed at a numeric keypad instead, and in November 1996 it became a company in Seattle.

The name stood for Text on 9 Keys and the pitch was one sentence long. Instead of tapping the 7 key four times to get an S, you pressed each key once and the software looked up every word that sequence could produce, then offered the most common one first. A Next key cycled the rest. The dictionary learned what you actually typed and moved those words up the order, which meant a phone that had been yours for six months wrote noticeably better than one out of the box.

AOL bought Tegic on 3 December 1999, in the stretch where AOL was buying anything that looked like it might matter on a phone. It did matter, and AOL did nothing much with it beyond licensing, which turned out to be the correct move. By the mid-2000s T9 had shipped on over two and a half billion handsets. Nuance announced the purchase on 21 June 2007 and closed it on 24 August for two hundred and sixty-five million dollars in cash, and Tegic stopped existing as a company at that point.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ writing turkish on nine keys ~

Turkish is a bad fit for a phone keypad and T9 made it workable. The alphabet has six letters English does not, and three of them, ğ and ı and ş, are outside the GSM 7-bit character set that SMS uses by default. Type one of those and the whole message silently switched to the 16-bit encoding, which cut you from 160 characters down to 70. Two messages instead of one, billed as two.

So most of the country wrote Turkish without Turkish letters, which is a strange thing to do to your own language and everybody did it anyway. T9 with a Turkish dictionary loaded sat on top of that compromise and mostly guessed correctly regardless, because Turkish is agglutinative and heavily suffixed, and a frequency-ordered dictionary handles that better than you would expect. The messages of that decade were written in a slightly broken orthography invented by a billing rule, and predicted by a system built for people who could not use their hands.

~ the day it died ~

The iPhone had gone on sale on 29 June 2007, eight weeks before the Tegic sale closed. Nobody framed the deal that way at the time. Nuance was assembling a mobile input portfolio and T9 was the crown jewel of the old world, and for a few more years it kept shipping on the feature phones that still outsold smartphones everywhere outside the rich countries.

What actually finished it was the full soft keyboard, where the constraint T9 solved simply evaporates. You get 26 keys, so you stop needing to disambiguate keypresses and start needing to correct fat fingers, which is a different problem. Cliff Kushler, who co-founded Tegic, had already seen this coming and started Swype in 2002. Nuance bought that too, in 2011. He kept solving the same problem on whatever input surface arrived next, and both of his companies ended up inside the same acquirer.

~ the long tail ~

T9 is not quite gone. It survives on Android as an option for people who prefer a big-target keypad to a cramped QWERTY, on some accessibility setups, and on the dumbphones that keep getting re-released for people trying to use their phones less. iOS added a keypad input mode of the same shape. The idea outlived the company by a wide margin, as ideas about text entry tend to.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »