Typing on a TV sucks. These long and/or garbled on-screen keyboards are both a nuisance to use and a real problem for anyone who wants to create things for your TV.
At CES 2025, I just discovered a better method. 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. The T9 was created out of necessity, back when the only buttons on cell phones were the number buttons. (Here’s a demo for the uninitiated.) TVs are also limited by their directional pad: on most set-top boxes and smart TVs, there’s no other way to tap.
The Direction9 system works like this: all letters are arranged 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 on the letter you are looking for. Every time you click the middle button to select a letter, the cursor returns 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 “smart” mode, which tries to predict what word you are looking for – click the “abc” button, then the “def” button, then the “def” button again, and it might tell you guess. typed “bed”. You can also turn it off and type more manually: when you click “abc”, a new table appears that lets you choose between letters.
The rest of the keys you would need – Enter, Space, Return, etc. – are arranged on the sides of this grid. Direction9’s trick here is that you don’t need to press Enter to select them; just click the enter button and it will be automatically submitted.
Direction9 CEO Leon Chang actually showed off an early version of this keyboard at last year’s CES. But he tells me that Direction9 is currently in talks with companies to integrate its keyboard into streaming apps and on smart TVs; For now, though, it’s still pure vaporware.
The whole process seems a bit complicated, but I figured it out in 30 seconds at the Direction9 booth at CES Unveiled. Chang said part of the appeal of the software is that you can eventually learn how to do it without even looking, and after a minute or two, I was able to do it. The smart prediction software seemed to struggle with more complicated words like “Shogun,” but in general it seemed to understand what I was looking for. It’s not a perfect system, and it certainly has a learning curve that your average row of letters on screen doesn’t have, but it’s the fastest I’ve ever typed on a TV. That has to count for something.
