Autocomplete Studies

Week 1 — before the screen, the keypad

Twelve keys. Twenty-six letters.

Every letter after the first press of a key is a guess.

That guess is predictive text. It always has been.

Multi-tap

Press 4 once for G, twice for H, three times for I.

Slow. Unambiguous. Nobody predicts anything.

T9

Press 4663 once, in order.

The phone looks up every word that mapping could spell: good, home, hood, goof…

…and picks one. That pick is the whole course.

“Text on 9 keys” — the name says exactly what it does, and nothing about how strange that is to actually build.

The tension, stated once

  • a small, fixed vocabulary (the dictionary)
  • an ambiguous signal (the keypress sequence)
  • a ranking someone built, resolving the ambiguity

Every week this semester changes one of these three things.

Today’s lab

Build the T9 disambiguator. 4663 should return good and home — and you should be able to defend which one comes first.

Whose dictionary?

Keep that question. It doesn’t go away for the rest of the semester — it just changes what counts as the dictionary.