Typing on TV sucks. These long and/or crooked on-screen keyboards both make for a pain in the ass to use, and are a real problem for anyone looking to make accessories for your TV.
But ces 2025I was just introduced in a better way. It is made by a company called direction9Joe has been working on the system for about a year, and it starts with a very old way of typing: T9. The T9 was built out of necessity, in the days when cellphone buttons were simply number keys. ,here is a demo For beginners.) TVs are similarly hampered by their directional pads — there's no other way to type on most set-top boxes and smart TVs.
The Direction9 system works like this: All the letters are ordered into a three-number grid, with each number assigned a number of letters, just like in T9. When you open the keyboard, your cursor is in the middle by default, and you click around the letter you're looking for. Every time you click the middle button to select a letter, the cursor moves back to the center, meaning you're always just a click or two away from the letter you're looking for.
You can use the keyboard's “Smart” mode, which tries to guess what word you're looking for – click the “ABC” button, then the “Def” button, and then the “Def” button. , and it might guess you were typing “bed”. You can also turn it off and type more manually: When you click “ABC”, it pops up a new array. which lets you choose between letters Is.
The rest of the keys you'll need – Enter, Space, Back and Forward – are arranged around the edges of this grid. Direction9's trick here is that you don't actually need to press Enter to select them; Just click on the enter button and it is automatically submitted.
Direction9 CEO Leon Chang actually demonstrated an early version of this keyboard At last year's CESBut he told me that Direct9 is now in talks with companies to bring its keyboard to streaming apps and smart TVs; However, for the time being, it is still pure vaporware.
The whole process sounds a little complicated, but I figured it out in 30 seconds while standing at Direction9's booth at the CES unveiling. Chang said part of the appeal of the software is that you can eventually learn to do it without even looking, and after a minute or two I was able to do that. The smart prediction software struggled with more complex words like “shogun”, but in general it seemed to be fine for what I was looking for. It's not a perfect system, and it definitely has a learning curve that your average on-screen line of letters doesn't have, but it's the fastest I've ever typed on a TV. That has to count for something.