Nuance Communications is buying AOL’s ubiquitous predictive text solution T9 and the subsidiary that makes it for $256 million, adding text recognition to its powerful voice recognition portfolio.

T9 is designed by Tegic Communications, a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL, which in turn is a subsidiary of Time Warner. T9 is easily the most widely used predictive text solution in the world, embedded in an estimated 2.5 billion devices produced by all of the major handset vendors. But Tegic has also expanded into other interface and input technology, investing heavily in touch-screen solutions.

Nuance vice president of worldwide marketing John Mahoney said that Tegic is a natural fit for Nuance as both on enabling the easy input of information into portable devices, but approach the problem in different, yet complimentary ways. “We’re heavily investing in mobility,” he said. “We’re seeing a huge demand for multiple input modalities.”

Mahoney said Nuance can use the Tegic software to create a multi-modal text input engine that, for example, could rely on network-based voice recognition to enter the bulk of the text, but use T9 technologies to correct or edit individual words within it. The result would be an interface where users can pick the best input method for their situation at the time as well as combine methods when convenient, he said.