Seeking to cash in on the booming wireless market in India, Canada-based Zi Corporation said it has developed a Hindi-based predictive text input for mobile phone users in India.
The company announced the marketing of eZiTap and eZiText Hindi for the mobile messaging market in India, which it claimed were the first predictive text input solutions available in the Hindi language for implementation with devise manufacturers.
''India is an increasingly important wireless market as mobile subscription has increased 500 per cent since January 2000, reaching 9.7 million subscribers in December 2002,'' said Gary Mendel, vice-president, sales and marketing, Zi Corporation.
''Mobile phone vendors are paying very close attention to India because recent projections reported by the Cellular Operators Association of India predict that the market will ramp up to 120 million subscribers by 2008,'' he said.
India's ministry of communications estimates that 25 million short messages are sent a day. An example of the growth of SMS in India was seen during last year's Diwali festival, the company said, when SMS messages in New Delhi quadrupled on Hutchison Telecom's GSM network.
Zi's Hindi solutions offers unique functionality such as word prediction, learning and personalisation to provide users with simpler and faster input over standard multi-tap entry, the company said.
The eZiTap and eZiText Hindi solutions have been developed to deliver users text input interfaces that naturally represent Hindi's written language, the Devanagari script, on the handset's small form factor screen and nine-button
This provides users with intuitive text input that are familiar, easy to learn, and fast to use, it added.
Zi also provides value-added language expertise to manufacturers to resolve display interface issue with ligatures, which are the combining of letters to form new shapes within the Hindi language.
These ligature forms are presently not displayed correctly on mobile phone interfaces, Zi said. The company said it has compiled and integrated this functionality for manufacturers to provide the most natural Hindi language display, reducing the engineering effort and improving time-to-market for new products targeted for the Indian market.
With Hindi multi-tap, the user must tap each key up to eight times to input every letter of a word. eZiText Hindi provides a fully predictive text input interface, allowing the user to compose messages with only one touch per letter.
Zi's comparative analysis identified that eZiText Hindi, on an average, is over 144 per cent faster than input using Hindi multi-tap, the company claimed.
''It is vital that mobile phone vendors address the Hindi language interface. It is one of the official languages of India and actively used for both personal and business communication by more than one third of the nation's population, which exceeds one billion,'' said Jacques LaPointe, Zi's director of product management.
UNI