Direction9 made a T9-based keyboard for better typing on TVs

Writing on a TV sucks. Those long and / or scrambled keyboards on the screen are both a nuisance to use, and a real problem for anyone who wants to do things for your TV.

To CES 2025I was just introduced to a better way. It is made by a company called Direction 9who worked on the system for about a year, and started with a very old way of writing: T9. T9 was created out of necessity, in the days when the only buttons on mobile phones were the numeric keys. (Here is a demo for the uninitiated.) Televisions are also limited by their direction pad – on most set-top boxes and smart TVs there is no other way to write.

The Direction9 system works like this: all the letters are laid out in a three-by-three number grid, with multiple letters assigned to each number, like T9. When you open the keyboard, your default cursor in the middle, and click around the letter you are 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 in a “smart” mode, which tries to predict what word you are looking for – click on the “abc” button, then the “def” button, and then the “def” button again, and it could guess. they were writing “bed”. You can also disable it and write more manually: when you click on “abc”, a new array opens that allows you to choose between the letters.

The rest of the keys you need – Enter, Space, Back, etc. – are arranged around the sides of this grid. Direction9’s trick here is that you don’t actually have to press enter to select; just click-click on the Enter button and it will automatically submit.

Direction9 CEO Leon Chang showed off an early version of this keyboard at last year’s CES. But he tells me that Direction9 is now in talks with companies to get his keyboard into streaming apps and smart TVs; for now, though, it’s still pure vaporware.

The whole process sounds slightly complicated, but I got it down in 30 seconds at the Direction9 booth at CES Unveiled. Chang said that 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 just that. The smart prediction software seemed to struggle with more complicated words like “Shogun”, but overall it seemed to grok what it was looking for. It’s not a perfect system, and it certainly has a learning curve that your average row of letters on the screen doesn’t, but it’s the fastest I’ve ever typed on a TV. That must count for something.