NEW YORK-Eatoni Ergonomics Inc. has staked its business case on the proposition that typing should be nearly as easy as talking if wireless data usage is to reach its full potential.
Howard Gutowitz, formerly a code breaker for Los Alamos National Laboratories, said he has been “working night and day since March 1998” to simplify text entry for wireless devices.
The venture-backed company, of which he is founder and chief executive officer, has obtained one patent and awaits approval of three more for its “linguistically optimal predictive text” entry solutions.
The thesis underpinning LOPA is that sequences and patterns of letters operate according to statistical probabilities unique to individual languages. Eatoni Ergonomics has developed its predictive text entry systems for 24 languages, and it is currently at work devising versions for Korean and Japanese, Gutowitz said.
The company believes its solution is superior to text entry systems that guess words from their internal dictionaries. By definition, such systems get confused by misspellings or by words, like Universal Resource Locators, that dictionaries do not list.
Because Eatoni’s predictive text entry systems do not rely on a dictionary, they facilitate easier typing entry of proper names, addresses, URLs and abbreviations.
LetterWise is the first generation of Eatoni’s LOPA software. It is designed to compete with the multi-tap systems in common use on mobile phones today.
On average, multi-tap requires 2.2 keystrokes per letter typed, Gutowitz said. LetterWise, which eliminates the need for users to press a “next” key or wait for a time-out, averages 1.18 strokes per letter.
LetterWise uses three kilobytes of memory, small enough to fit easily onto a Subscriber Identity Module card. Although SIM cards generally are associated with GSM air interfaces, the predictive text system is agnostic regarding RF technology, Gutowitz said.
Eatoni Ergonomics is negotiating with smart-card manufacturers and wireless carriers.
“9We are doing our best to jackhammer open the (carriers’) walled gardens. They could charge one cent each time the customer types in a URL,” he said.
“It’s been a real hard problem for us so far in getting to a usage-based model for our software.”
The company also has developed a touch-typable predictive text entry system it calls WordWise, in which the alternate key functions like the shift key. On average, WordWise requires 1.0005 keystrokes per letter, Gutowitz said.
WordWise, which requires about 30 kilobytes of memory, produces readable text, even if the user makes typographical errors.
