When this is all you have to type with, you need new keyboard ideas. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
Typing on a TV sucks. Those long and / or scrambled on-screen keyboards are both a nuisance to use, and a real problem for anyone wanting to make stuff for your TV.
At CES 2025, I was just introduced to a better way. It’s made by a company called Direction9, which has been working on the system for about a year, and it starts with a very old way of typing: T9. T9 was created by necessity, back in the days when cellphones’ only buttons were the number keys. (Here’s a demo for the uninitiated.) TVs are similarly constrained by their directional pad — on most set-top boxes and smart TVs there’s no other way to type.
The Direction9 system works like this: all the letters are arrayed in a three-by-three number grid, with multiple letters assigned to each number, just like T9. When you open the keyboard, your cursor defaults to the middle, and you click around to the letter you’re looking for. Every time you click the middle button to select a letter, the cursor jumps back to the center, which means you’re always only a click or two from the letter you’re looking for.
You can use the keyboard a “smart” mode, which tries to predict which word you’re looking for — click…
