Design News for Mechanical and Design Engineers

It's in English, Finnish, Polish, Spanish, and Swedish.

It's in Turkish, Thai, Portuguese, Romanian, and Greek.

eZiText™is a technology that allows people to type full sentences into telephone-style keypads with a minimum number of strokes.

Canadian-based Zi Corp. does this with "predictive software" that guesses a user's next word based on frequency, meaning, style, and syntax. Of course, every language is different, so the technology can be paired with any one of 26 different linguistic databases, including the ones above.

As collaborative engineering spreads to the wireless Web, designers on the move are forced to do their jobs from cell phones and PDAs. But without full-sized keyboards, communication can be a chore. Have you ever tried surfing the Web on an Internet-enabled cell phone?

So Zi Corp. studied how words are used in different languages, and used the data to supercharge the speed of keypad typing. For instance, when you enter names into your cell phone's address book without eZiText, you must tap the 2-key once for an A, twice for a B, and three times for a C. Typing the word "tomorrow" that way takes 18 taps. But with predictive technology, you can do it in four taps. For character-based languages such as Chinese and Korean, the system breaks characters into seven types of strokes, and works in a similar way. Try a demo titled "English mobile phone" at www.zicorp.com. eZiText also works on full-sized keyboards and PDAs, and offers basic grammar like spacing and capatalization.