T12: an advanced text input system with phonetic support for mobile devices

Abstract

The popular T9 text input system for mobile devices uses a predictive dictionary-based disambiguation scheme, enabling a user to type in commonly-used words with low overhead. We present a new text input system called T12, which in addition to providing T9's capabilities, also allows a user to cycle through the possible choices based on phonetic similarity, and to elaborate commonly used abbreviations, acronyms and other short forms. This ability to cycle through the possible choices acts as a spelling checker, which provides suggestions from the dictionary with similar pronunciation as the input word.