As the tools of communication converge with powerful and feature-rich technology, our mobile devices have now reached new frontiers - becoming what was formerly considered a far off fantasy. For years, many have imagined a world where people and devices intelligently interacted with one another, a world where technology would intuitively know and understand the user. Motorola is one step closer to making this fantasy a reality with its “Intelligent Interaction” initiative, which reflects its goal of providing everyone with a seamlessly mobile experience.

Part of Motorola’s Seamless Mobility architecture includes technologies that allow users to focus more on communication and less on the task of communication. Motorola’s “Intelligent Interaction” initiative focuses upon multimodal, goal-oriented interaction methodologies that are consistent across devices. The hiding technological complexity and focus on providing easily accessible communications capabilities is a growing point of differentiation for Motorola products.

As the ever-growing arsenal of devices provide an increasing amount of features, the challenge remains that each new device will burden connectivity, rather than assist its owner. Motorola is tackling this problem by concentrating intelligent interaction research in areas that maximize intuitive user benefit. Two current technologies in particular that deserve special recognition include:

Finger writing: Taking intuitive technology to the next level, Motorola has created a text input method based on writing characters on a traditional handset keypad with one’s finger. First introduced with the Motorola A668, this breakthrough technology enabled a whole generation of Chinese to utilize affordable text messaging in their native ideograph-based language.

Since the introduction of the Motorola A668, finger writing has been incorporated into new, sleek design-focused handsets such as the Motorola A732 and V321 – fulfilling Motorola’s belief that mobile devices should not require the user to adapt, but the devices themselves should be adaptive to the user.

Bilingual Talking Dictionary:Motorola has introduced the first dual-language “talking” dictionary in a mobile handset, and is a feature of the hugely popular new Motorola MING smartphone. MING users enter a word in a native language; the on-board handwriting recognition allows the text to be entered naturally by writing directly on the large 1.5" x 2" screen. The word is then “spoken” aloud by the MING in a foreign language. Simultaneously, the definition of the word is displayed on-screen in the native language. Alternatively, when a foreign word is entered the MING will pronounce the word in that language and display the definition in the user’s native language.

In an increasingly globalized business environment, electronic, bilingual dictionaries are proving to be helpful business tools. Synthetic text-to-speech is also becoming a popular feature of phones. However, never have these two features been linked together to provide on-the-fly translation between two languages on a mobile phone. The natural speech output provides users the invaluable experience of actually hearing the native pronunciation of a foreign word.

No bilingual dictionary with natural speech output of two languages has ever been available on a mobile phone due to the limited memory and computing power. This has left on-phone dictionary solutions far inferior to larger, dedicated devices. A product of Motorola Labs, the Technology Organization of Motorola, the MING’s Bilingual Talking Dictionary is a high-quality cross language dictionary optimized for use on small hand-held devices.

Looking ahead to the future, Motorola’s continuing dedication to providing intelligent interaction-capable systems lies in tools such as multimodal interaction, advanced semantic fusion of multimodal inputs and cross-platform architecture – intricate and complex technologies to maintain a simple user experience. By focusing efforts on intelligent interaction technologies and incorporating them into more and more Motorola products, Motorola will make seamless mobility a reality, thus making interaction with devices a more enjoyable, more productive experience for users everywhere.