Stroke of genius
Solving the vexing problem of text messaging in Chinese
But Schaumburg-based Motorola Inc. has come up with a revolutionary new system that makes text messaging and e-mail available to the Chinese. It's called "finger writing," and it involves writing on a keypad with a fingerprint, and allowing software to help in writing text messages and e-mail on mobile phones.
The breakthrough technology aimed, at one-fifth of the world's population, has earned Motorola its third Chicago Innovation Award, the most of any Chicago area company.
Tom MacTavish, vice president and director of Motorola's Center for Human Interaction Research, said, "In the past, cell-phone users had to use Roman characters for text messaging, or nothing at all.
Existing text-input systems relied on mapping key-presses to characters or words. With mathematical permutations potentially running into the billions, mapping solutions were just not practical for Chinese."
Besides the sheer number of characters, each person put his own spin on the letters. Jian-Cheung Huang, director of the Motorola China Research Center, summarized the challenge: "1,306,313,812 people -- 13,000 characters in traditional Chinese, and everyone writes every character a little differently."
In addition, systems using a stylus on a touch screen, are expensive, and people often lose their styluses. But Motorola staff in Shanghai and the Chicago area cracked the code and found a way of composing text messages on a special key pad on which the writer traced out the letters. MacTavish said combining the keypad with finger writing meant that a dedicated keypad was not necessary.
The consumer's own digits became the digital input device. The team placed a glide sensor, similar to the technology used on touch-sensitive elevators, under the keypad to detect writing on the smooth keypad surface. The Motorolans also developed handwriting-recognition and word-prediction software that overcame several problems, including the one posed by Chinese writers making their strokes in different orders.
The writer traces letters on the keypad, and they appear on the display screen in either Chinese or Roman characters. Researchers overcame the limits of writing in a small space by tracking the center of the finger. The finger-writing system predicts the characters the writer wants.
If initial choices are correct, the writer can zip through a message.
The system offers options the user can choose among, and learns what characters the user tends to favor. MacTavish said finger writing might have a place in other countries using graphical alphabets, such as Thailand, Japan, Korea, Indonesia and India, and also places where Farsi, Arabic and Hebrew are spoken.
This could open up new services for cell-phone users in much of the world, plus new revenue for the wireless carriers. MacTavish said Motorola has sold more than 4 million PDA phones with pen-based and/or finger writing technology capabilities in China. No breakdown is available on finger writing phones. Finger writing on mobile phones is an apt gift to China because China brought the world writing on paper about 2 millennia ago.