Tegic

Tegic Communications was a software company best known for developing the T9 predictive text input technology used on mobile phones. Founded in the mid-1990s, Tegic created a solution designed to speed up text entry on devices with numeric keypads by predicting words from a dictionary as users pressed keys.

T9 works by analyzing a user’s keystrokes on a multi-tap keypad and proposing likely word completions, typically requiring fewer keystrokes than traditional multi-tap texting. The technology supports multiple languages and was licensed to numerous handset manufacturers and mobile operators, leading to widespread deployment on feature phones in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Its influence extended beyond simple text entry, shaping the design of input methods on many mobile devices during that era.

In 2007, Tegic was acquired by Nuance Communications, and its predictive text technology was integrated into Nuance’s broader portfolio of mobile and speech-recognition products. The acquisition helped Nuance expand its offerings for mobile devices, combining linguistic models for text input with voice-enabled features. The T9 brand and concepts remain associated with the era of hardware-keyphone texting, and Tegic’s contributions are viewed as a significant step in the evolution of on-device language models and user interface design for non-QWERTY keyboards.