South Africans will be soon be able to use Zulu and Xhosa predictive texting to send SMSes, says Tegic Communications, a unit of AOL`s wireless division.
The software, T9 Text Input 7.3 (T9), will be included in mobile phones that will be shipped to SA by the end of the year, says Ray Tsuchiyama, VP of emerging markets of Tegic Communications.
T9 for the SA market offers enhanced multilingual support, making it easier for users to switch back and forth between languages when sending an SMS, he says.
Tsuchiyama says Tegic Communications has an agreement with 90% of cellphone manufacturers, including Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson among others, to build in multilingual predictive texting software during the manufacturing process.
To date, the software is available in 55 languages, including Afrikaans, Swahili and Arabic, he explains.
Tsuchiyama says the availability of local language SMS software will encourage older people, who are more comfortable communicating in their own language, to use the SMS facility on their phones. This will, in turn, encourage them to undertake other activities and transactions using their mobile phones, he says.
It will also encourage young people to communicate in their local languages, helping to preserve their language and culture, he notes.
Tsuchiyama says 800 million handsets of all kinds, which have local language texting capabilities, have been shipped all over the world, including Africa, Brazil, India and Singapore.
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