Predictive Text or T9 will arrive in the iOS 18 Phone app

iOS 18 will undergo major changes in design, in particular due to the drift taken by Apple to allow the user to personalize the iPhone as much as possible. In addition, other applications such as Messages, Mail or Calendar are also undergoing significant changes at the interface and functional level. Another application that has also acquired new functions is application Phone and one of the new features, although for many imperceptible in the opening speech, was the supports T9 predictive text technology,

available in particular on Android, which allows quickly dial a phone number convert contact initials to dialed numbers within the app itself. We explain it to you in detail below.

T9 predictive text comes to iOS 18 for speed dialing in the Phone app

First, let’s give a little context. T9 Predictive Text, short for 9-Key Text, is a text writing technology developed for mobile devices with numeric keypads, widely used in the 90s or 2000s. In fact, if you remember, it was one of the attractions when sending SMS daily by selecting letters by clicking on the numbers according to the letter that we were looking for. This system allows users write words by pressing each key only once for each letter

instead of having to press the same key multiple times to select the desired letter (for example, to type the letter “C”, you would press the “2” key three times on a traditional number pad).

This technology It was integrated by Apple in iOS 18 in the Phone application. Thanks to this technology, the user will be able to quickly call a contact without having to search for them in the Contacts application. Let’s take an example, like the one you have in the screenshot taken during the inaugural WWDC24 keynote: the contact is called “Johnny” and to quickly search for it, enter the number 56466, which corresponds to the initials of the name . The 5 corresponds to the O, the 6 to the H and the last two 6 to the two Ns.

iOS 18 takes care of integrate a prediction algorithm via an integrated dictionary with the contacts included in our device guess the name we want to try to call. This small function, although not very relevant, will be useful to users who are fond of the T9 or who come from Android whose use is more established.