FAQ:Languages and Dictionaries |
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Do you have a version for my native language?
Eatoni has over 300 languages available.
DICTIONARY
Does Eatoni use a dictionary to find words like T9®, eZiText® and iTap® do?
No. Eatoni does not use a dictionary. Unlike word guessing or dictionary programs, Eatoni products don't mind if you make spelling errors, or enter URLs, proper names, abbreviations or addresses.
Our products can enter these "non-words" without a problem, as can Multi Tap. Eatoni products, however, allow you to type twice as fast as Multi Tap.
Why don't you use a dictionary?
There are several good reasons not to use a dictionary.
- When you use a dictionary, the only words you can type are those that appear in the dictionary. If you want to enter a first name or surname, an email address, a URL, a street name, an abbreviation, a swear word, a word from a foreign language, a neologism, slang, a restaurant name, a stock symbol, a friend's nickname, etc., you're very likely going to 1) Try to enter the word, and see that it fails; 2) Backspace the incorrect word away; and 3) Re-enter the whole thing from scratch using Multi Tap. That's three times the amount of work. In LetterWise and WordWise Manual you can always enter anything directly. Consider the list of surname examples from Question 4.3: how many of those would you expect to find in your dictionary?
- Storing a dictionary requires a lot of memory, and memory is very precious - both because it is expensive and because it must be shared by all applications in a device. Eatoni's LetterWise works with approximately 20 times less memory than dictionary-based methods, and WordWise consumes between one half and one third of the space these other solutions require. With memory for cell phones costing in the region of $3 per megabyte, the memory saving in a 10 language cell phone can amount to $2 per unit.
- Performance of dictionary-based systems does not scale gracefully as dictionaries size is reduced. To consume less memory using a dictionary-based approach, one must throw out entire words. Thus if a smaller dictionary is used instead of a larger one, entire words simply disappear from the set of words that can be entered. In contrast, a statistical approach does not lose words when its database is reduced in space. All words can still be entered using the method, but some very rare words will require an extra tap. A system based on a statistical approach degrades gracefully as memory is reduced.
What is LOPT?
LOPT stands for Linguistically Optimal Predictive Text entry. The system is "linguistic because we rely entirely on linguistic and statistical properties of the underlying language rather than using a simple word list approach. The system is "optimal" as the CEHLNSTY code used in WordWise is chosen to maximally reduce ambiguity when predicting the text a user intends to enter.
Looking for an optimal encoding is in some way the opposite of cryptography. While cryptography seeks codes that are as difficult as possible to decipher, the optimal coding approach seeks codes which are as easy as possible to decipher.
Eatoni has found that with the addition of a shifted key and optimally chosen shifted letters (Question 2.3), the standard ambiguous code (Question 2.1) can be made virtually unambiguous, and thus nearly as versatile as a QWERTY keyboard. WordWise substantially improves on all previous text entry methods, as it was designed to simultaneously optimize the two fundamental values that characterize
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