Eric Collins, a VP with the Seattle, Washington-based company, told ComputerWire that Tegic has long term plans to extend the applicability of its market leading T9 predictive text input software beyond the mobile handsets it is known for and into a much wider range of electronics devices. These are likely to include handheld and console gaming devices, cordless (DECT) telephones, avionic devices and car navigation systems, set top boxes and remote controls.

We think the consumer extension is just the logical place to be, said Collins. However, Tegic’s efforts are set to extend beyond simply porting its software, which uses the alphanumeric keypads of mobile handsets to infer the intended word for any series of keystrokes, to a greater range of devices.

Instead, the company, a fully owned subsidiary of media giant America Online, intends to make predictive text input just part of a more holistic concept of predictive text input into electronic equipment. The next step is an obvious one – to build a suite of products around T9 that will allow users to switch [their method of data input] depending on their environment and their comfort level, said Tegic’s principle product manager, Lisa Nathan.

Tegic’s plans include integration of T9’s many predictive features with input technologies such as Qwerty keyboards, speech-recognition, and handwriting-recognition software, much of which will be achieved through partnerships with specialists in each field. Collins mentioned ISVs such as IBM, Scansoft, ART, VoiceSignal Technologies, and Conversay as likely partners in such a venture. Collins said a launch date of the second quarter 2006 might be possible if everything goes to plan.

Tegic’s dominance of the predictive text input software market goes almost unnoticed, despite serving about half of the total global handset market. Collins said T9 will ship on over 300 million handsets in 2004 alone. However, with a license fee per unit of around the price of sending two or three text messages, according to Collins, Tegic’s absolute growth prospects have been limited until now.

Tegic has also taken steps to improve T9’s attractiveness both as an end-user tool and as a revenue earning technology in the mobile phone world. For users, the company has created an adaptive suite of features that help make its use both simpler to use, such as next-word prediction, and more in tune with individual needs.

Early efforts to include this type of functionality have resulted in handsets with unique word databases for the American Nascar auto-racing series and for the European soccer championship. However, this is to be extended to cover youth subcultures and hybrid languages such as Hinglish, which combines Hindi and English elements.

Tegic expects some OEMs to enable updates to be downloaded over the air, providing an additional source of revenue in a similar way to new ring tones. Operators are very interested in that as a way to help reduce customer churn, said Nathan. The first T9-upgradeable handsets are likely to be seen next year.

Also in the works, and the latest upgrade to T9, is support in the forthcoming 7.2 version of bilingual language support. This capability, which Nathan described as a lynchpin feature, will allow users to use T9 to key in words from more than one language database simultaneously. Tegic expects this to be extremely useful for non-English speakers who frequently need to use (often technical and computer) words and phrases from the language.

T9 currently supports some 40 alphabetic languages as well as five symbol-based languages and is available for the majority of handset operating systems, whether open platforms or proprietary. The new features take up between 10K and 20K of additional memory on top of a base memory requirement of around 40K.

T9’s main rival in the Western handset market is Motorola’s iTap software, which the handset number two uses on its PCS models. However, even Motorola turns to T9 for its iDen phones.