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The Panasonic model that will contain Irish is the KX-TCD755. Moreover, Irish is not the only language contained in the new Panasonic model; users will also be able to send text messages from their home phone in other, lesser-used European tongues such as Basque, Scottish, Welsh, Catalan, Croatian Czech and Galician. More widely used languages, such as German, Italian, Spanish and English are also included.
In all, the new Panasonic phone will let users send predictive text SMS messages in 24 different languages.
The technology Panasonic is using is based on a product called LetterWise, software that allows a phone to recognise what words a user is attempting to spell and predicts the word. The purpose of LetterWise is to speed up the entire text creation process on a handset and is made by New York company Eatoni Ergonomics.
Eatoni has been in the press in recent weeks after it signed a series of deals with cordless phone makers in Europe, including Siemens, Panasonic and Philips, to have LetterWise installed on new phones. These deals have given Eatoni access to around 50 percent of the DECT phone market in Europe. The company also has its sights set on breaking into the mobile market using LetterWise.
"We figure if you could give a person who speaks Irish the chance to send an SMS in his native language they would happily do so," Howard Gutowitz chief executive officer of Eatoni told ElectricNews.Net. Gutowitz said that the cost of making LetterWise available in almost any language was minimal, both from Eatoni's perspective and from the phone manufacturer's point of view.
Although Panasonic has only included 24 languages in its phones, LetterWise is in fact available in over 120 languages, including Alemannisch, Bicolano, Breton, Emiliano-Romagnolo, Esperanto, French-Canadian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hawaiian, Icelandic, Maori, Punjabi, Swahili, Tok-Pisin, Xhosa and Zulu.
"The truth is people want to use their own language. Millions of people speak Hindi and would like to send text messages in that language, but the phone makers always say, 'they can speak English so why bother,'" Gutowitz said. "We don't agree with that...language is important to people."
Gutowitz also explained that in some areas, making technology available in the local tongue is a legal requirement. Furthermore he said that Eatoni also looks on the technology as a tool to help people, Irish students for example, who are learning a second language at home or in school.
According to Gutowitz the memory needs for each LetterWise language is around 3K (for Roman character-based written languages), compared to other similar products such as AOL's T9 dictionary which demands as much as 60K per language, severely limiting the number of languages available on any given handset.
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