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Panini is a new multilingual Keypad system for India supporting 11 languages of India on the Mobile phone. The Panini keypad system when installed on a cell phone allows the user to type conveniently in Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Gurmukhi (Punjabi) and Assamese. Each of these languages have over 10 million speakers with several over 50 million speakers. There was no such easily usable means to type in a regional language of India available until now. Mobile penetration in India is high with phones having reached those segments of society who are unfamiliar with the English alphabets and hence had no way to utilise the texting applications of the phone.

This new Mobile Texting technology called Panini named in the honour of the well known ancient Sanskrit Grammarian who lived 2500 years ago, is from a Noida based Indian startup myMobile Ergonomics. The product supporting all the regional languages of India was released on the 31st Jan 2009 quitely on the web, made available for free download from the website www.PaniniKeypad.com

Panini allows one to compose a text message in a regional language of India, and send it to any other phone as a low cost SMS. Panini also offers SMS compression which increases the standard payload of a single SMS from 70 characters of Unicode to about 240 characters of Indian language text in a single message for the same cost. This opens up new possibilities for cost effective Mobile marketing and meaningful Information enabling applications for rural India over the ubiquitous SMS. Mobile phone penetration in India is very high with about about 336 million active mobile phone users. And growing at over 10 million new users per month in the past months. The cost of mobile phone calls and text messages in India are amongst the lowest in the world at about 2 cents.

Panini also offers automatic transliteration between the languages of India in the manner that a person can write a message in Hindi and send it in Malayalam, a language of Kerala in South India. Or receive a message in Tamil and read it in Gujarati. This would be helpful in a country of many languages. Indian language scripts typically use many characters not all of which are used equally frequently and the Abiguda scripts are full of ligatures which follow complex rules of usages. The easy to use interface to type of Panini is based on a patent pending model in which no characters are permanently assigned to the keypad, instead they are mapped dynamically to the numeric keys as the user moves a 3×4 grid using the navigator keys over a standard form character map. The application also supports Touchscreen phones in which case the user can choose directly from Virtual keypad to type. The character map maintains consistency across the Indian languages which share many commonalities from their origins in Sanskrit. This makes it possible for someone to type even in a language unknown to him from reckoning. Say, it would be familiar for someone to type in Bengali even if he was only familiar with the character map of Hindi.

Panini does alow composition of messages in mixed languages. The compression scheme allows for the insertion of English words and symbols as is often a requirement in India, when composing messages in regional Indian languages.

The Usability technology in the form of a Java application that can be installed on a phone is available for free download from the website www.PaniniKeypad.com The company myMobile Ergonomics which also developed a new statistical Predictive Text technology for English texting called CleverTexting recently, is going to introduce the advantages of Statistical Prediction to the Indian language model in a soon to be released Clever version of Panini.