Abstract

There is no question that short message service (SMS) has achieved huge success in the wireless world. Billions of SMS text messages are sent every day worldwide. SMS is now a major revenue generator for wireless carriers like expresso and MTN of Ghana. A lot of innovative applications are now built on top of the SMS technology and more are being developed. One of the emerging applications is the use of text messages by users to search for things. Currently these applications allow for just simple interactions and queries. Currently SMS text messages are restricted to at most 140 bytes (1120 bits) of data, so one SMS message can contain up to 160 characters if 7-bit character encoding is used, 70 characters if 16-bit Unicode UCS2 character encoding is used. In this paper, we propose a way to create complex queries and interaction between the user and theexternal short message entity (ESME) which maintains database of information and responds to queries, and also maintain a dialog with the user when search result is longer than 160 characters.

Key words: Unicode, external short message entity, short message service, wireless application protocol, language analyzer.