SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR AUTOMATICALLY SELECTING AMONG A PLURALITY OF INPUT MODES

A continuous input system allows a system operator to continuously input a plu-rality of polysemous icon symbols to access stored (l3, l4) morphemes, words, phrases, or sentences corresponding to an icon se-quence. The system, with automatic mode selection for the input system, containing a plurality of character and symbol keys (4), allows for automatically selecting (4, 5) of the icon (12, 17, 22) mode, a character or word prediction mode (14, 15, 23); and even a subsequent suffix mode, to allow a user to enter morphemes, words, phrases, or sen-tences sequentially. Further, by utilizing the character and word prediction (l4, 15, 23) modes, including the suffix (27, 32) mode; words; phrases or sentences corresponding to non-accessible icon sequences can beau-tomatically activated without having to man-ually switch out of the icon mode or select the character and word prediction mode. Such automatic icon, word prediction, char-acter and suffix mode selecting, thereby al-lows continuous text (16) or speech (18) gen-eration with a minimal number of input key (4) activations necessary for a system opera-tor.