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Zi First to Market with Hindi-Based Predictive Text Input Products for Mobile Phone Users in India
Hindi language input now available for eZiTap™ and eZiText®; New products reinforce Zi's market leadership in Asia
CALGARY, AB, January 13, 2003 - Zi Corporation (NASDAQ: ZICA) (TSX: ZIC), a leading provider of intelligent interface solutions, today announced the availability of eZiTap and eZiText Hindi for the mobile messaging market in India. eZiTap and eZiText are the first predictive text input solutions available in the Hindi language for implementation with device manufacturers for the large, untapped Indian market.
"India is an increasingly important wireless market as mobile subscription has increased 500 percent since January 2000, reaching 9.7 million subscribers in December 2002," said Gary Mendel, vice president sales and marketing, Zi Corporation. "Mobile phone vendors are paying very close attention to India because recent projections reported by the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) predict that the market will ramp up to 120 million subscribers by 2008," added Mendel. India's Ministry of Communications estimate 25 million short messages (SMS) are sent a day. An example of the growth of SMS in India was during last autumn's Divali festival, a popular annual religious festival held in New Delhi. SMS messages in India's highly populated capital city quadrupled during this time on Hutchison Telecom's GSM network during a key day of the festival.
Zi's Hindi solutions offer unique functionality such as word prediction, learning and personalization to provide users with simpler and faster input over standard multi-tap entry. The eZiTap and eZiText Hindi solutions have been developed to deliver users text input interfaces that naturally represent Hindi's written language, the Devanagari script, on the handset's small form factor screen and nine-button keypad. This provides users with intuitive text input that are familiar, easy to learn, and fast to use.
Zi also provides value-added language expertise to manufacturers to resolve display interface issue with ligatures, which are the combining of letters to form new shapes within the Hindi language. These ligature forms are presently not displayed correctly on mobile phone interfaces. Zi has compiled and integrated this functionality for manufacturers to provide the most natural Hindi language display - reducing the engineering effort and improving time-to-market for new products targeted for the Indian market.
With Hindi multi-tap, the user must tap each key up to eight times to input every letter of a word. eZiText Hindi provides a fully predictive text input interface, allowing the user to compose messages with only one touch per letter. Zi's comparative analysis identified that eZiText Hindi, on average, is over 144 percent faster than input using Hindi multi-tap. eZiTap combines the flexibility of multi-tap input with the speed benefits of word prediction and learning. Words are predicted and displayed on the phone's screen as users multi-tap Hindi letters. eZiTap Hindi is targeted for users that create their own texting language short-cuts.
"It is vital mobile phone vendors address the Hindi language interface. It is one of the official languages of India and actively used for both personal and business communication by more than one third of the nation's population, which exceeds one billion inhabitants," said Jacques LaPointe, director of product management, Zi Corporation. "The release of Zi's first predictive Hindi text input solutions will strategically enable both device manufacturers and network operators to capture the exponentially growing Indian messaging market through the adoption of more intelligent and intuitive interfaces that are simply faster and easier for local consumers to use," added LaPointe.
To obtain further details on Hindi solutions for eZiText and eZiTap products, contact info@zicorp.com. Or view the Hindi demo on Zi's Website at http://www.zicorp.com/ezitexthindi.htm.
About Zi Corporation
Zi Corporation (www.zicorp.com) is a market-driven technology company delivering intelligent interface solutions to enhance the user experience of wireless and consumer technologies. The company's core technology products, eZiTap and eZiText, connect people to short messaging, e-mail, e-commerce, Web browsing and similar applications in almost any written language. eZiNet is a new network-based platform that enables handset manufacturers and network operators to provide users with access to media rich content and information stored on a network, despite the memory restrictions of the mobile device. Zi supports its strategic partners and customers from offices in Asia, Europe and North America. A publicly traded company, Zi Corporation is listed on the NASDAQ National Market (ZICA) and the Toronto Stock Exchange (ZIC).
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For more information:
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Investor Inquiries: Allen & Caron Inc Jill Bertotti Phone: (949) 474-4300 E-mail: jill@allencaron.com |
Zi Corporation Dale Kearns Chief Financial Officer Phone: (403) 233-8875 E-mail: investor@zicorp.com |
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Media Inquiries: Allen & Caron Inc Len Hall (Business/Financial Media) Phone: (949) 474-4300 E-mail: len@allencaron.com |