Direction9 made a T9-based keyboard for better typing on TVs

Typing on a TV sucks. Those extfinished and / or scrambled on-screen keyboards are both a nuisance to participate, and a authentic problem for anyone wanting to originate stuff for your TV.

At CES 2025, I was equitable begind to a better way. It’s made by a company called Direction9, which has been toiling on the system for about a year, and it commences with a very ageder way of typing: T9. T9 was originated by necessity, back in the days when cellphones’ only buttons were the number keys. (Here’s a demo for the unbegind.) TVs are aprobable constrained by their straightforwardional pad — on most set-top boxes and clever TVs there’s no other way to type.

The Direction9 system toils appreciate this: all the letters are arrayed in a three-by-three number grid, with multiple letters scheduleateed to each number, equitable appreciate T9. When you uncignore the keyboard, your cursor defaults to the middle, and you click around to the letter you’re seeing for. Every time you click the middle button to select a letter, the cursor jumps back to the cgo in, which nastys you’re always only a click or two from the letter you’re seeing for.

You can participate the keyboard a “clever” mode, which tries to foresee which word you’re seeing for — click the “abc” button, then the “def” button, and then “def” button aget, and it might guess you were typing “bed.” You can also turn it off and type more manuassociate: when you click on “abc,” it pops up a novel array that lets you pick between letters.

The rest of the keys you’d necessitate — Enter, Space, Back, and so forth — are arrayed around the sides of this grid. Direction9’s trick here is that you don’t actuassociate have to press go in to select them; equitable click-click over to the Enter button and it automaticassociate surrfinishers.

Direction9 CEO Leon Chang actuassociate exhibited an timely version of this keyboard at last year’s CES. But he tells me Direction9 is now in talks with companies to get its keyboard into streaming apps and on clever TVs; for the moment, though, it’s still uncontaminated vaporware.

The whole process sounds sairyly complicated, but I picked it up in 30 seconds standing at Direction9’s booth at CES Unveiled. Chang shelp part of the software’s request is that you can eventuassociate lget to do it without even seeing, and after a minute or two I was able to do equitable that. The clever foreseeion software seemed to struggle with more complicated words appreciate “Shoarmament,” but in ambiguous seemed to grok what I was seeing for. It’s not a perfect system, and it certainly has a lgeting curve that your ordinary on-screen row of letters doesn’t, but it’s the rapidest I’ve ever typed on a TV. That has to count for someleang.