Zi Corporation was a company that specialized in text input, mainly for cell phones. Nintendo used a few products from Zi Corporation for the Wii and DS. For the Wii, they used eZiText (predictive text), and Decuma (handwriting recognition) for DS as used in games like Crosswords DS and Brain Age. The way eZiText works on the Wii hasn't been figured out, nor how Decuma works. Zi Corporation was bought by Nuance Communications (notable for their "Dragon") software.
For the 3DS and possibly the Switch, a library is used called iWnn.