The parade of innovations at WWDC continues. Apple has added a method to dial a contact’s name on a smartphone via… T9. This is the old-new dialing of phone numbers from the address book by entering letters on the smartphone keyboard.

For example, to call Mykola, you need to dial 4-5-4-9 (for K-O-L-Y on these numbers). On many Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, OnePlus, Vivo, Tecno, Redmi… and other Android phones, this option will search for the closest alphabetical match of a person’s name in your contacts. The iPhone did not have this feature.

Now iOS will automatically filter the address book on the iPhone to find possible matches. The name and number of the corresponding contact will appear at the top of the screen.

Other new features of the Phone app in iOS 18 include integrated call recording with automatic transcription and updated searchable call history.

TheT9 input method was developed by Tegic Communications. It is a provider of predictive text input software solutions owned by America Online, Inc., founded in 1995.