Making Predictive Typing Better

It used to be that I ham­mered out text mes­sages each let­ter at a time, man­u­ally typ­ing rather than mess with that “T9 crap” and then I dis­cov­ered how it worked. That’s right, I did it the hard way for a long time until I took the time to learn how to text faster.

To my credit I got extremely fast tap­ping out texts the old fash­ioned way. But it was still slower than I was with T9.

On my old Sprint phone the T9 was pretty awe­some, it learned eas­ily and it had a good algo­rithm. When I switched to T-mobile the new phone took some get­ting used to and I dis­cov­ered it’s T9 is strictly worse than Sprint’s. How?

It goes purely alpha­bet­i­cally regard­less of how long the word it’s guess­ing is. That means that if I’m try­ing to type some­thing out, if my tar­get word is five let­ters long, but it knows a word that is seven let­ters long but comes before it alpha­bet­i­cally it shows me the first five let­ters of the longer word.

And the sec­ond sin is that it doesn’t pro­vide the full word it’s sug­gest­ing. So if I’m try­ing to type “Astro­naut” and it gets to “Astron” where there aren’t any other sim­i­lar words in its dic­tio­nary, it doesn’t pro­vide the “aut” requir­ing me to type three more letters.

And the third sin is the some­times unusual dic­tio­nary. Train­ing it the man­ual way is too much work, there should be a much eas­ier answer. And there is. I fig­ured it out.

A ser­vice that takes all your tweets on twit­ter and parses the text to build out a dic­tio­nary for use on your phone. Include the top 100 most com­mon words, or what­ever num­ber is proven to be best, but a per­son­al­ized dic­tio­nary is invalu­able in texting.

Twit­ter could even take this idea and parse all the Tweets it takes in, then pro­vide key­word infor­ma­tion to ven­dors (cha-ching busi­ness plan!) so they can make bet­ter phones from the fac­tory. Alas though, nei­ther of these will prob­a­bly come to fruition.

Unless Android from Google hits a sta­ble ver­sion and can be dis­trib­uted on phones, then the sky is the limit.

kthxbai