Text entry mechanism for small keypads

摘要

A data entry mechanism for reduced keypads uses relative frequency of usage of bigrams to assist the user. The first character specified by a user is specified unambiguously, the second character specified by the user is also unambiguously specified but efficiency is enhanced by using relative frequency of usage of bigrams, and the remaining characters are specified by single key presses and most likely intended words are predicted according to frequency of usage of words matching the keys pressed by the user. Similarly, the third character can be also interpreted using relative frequency of usage of trigrams which include the first two entered characters. Fourth and subsequent characters can also be interpreted in the context of relative frequency of usage of other n-grams.