[Indic-computing-users] Writing Hindi or Tamil on mobile phones

[Guntupalli K. <kar...@fr...>]

Writing Hindi or Tamil on mobile phones

See http://hindustantimes.com/news/181_157163,00040001.htm
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Indian languages are too complex to make it to the computer keyboard
or make the most of cell phone power, right?

Wrong! A Mumbai-based team of scientists has worked out an innovative
solution using a strong dose of lateral thinking that leverages the
strengths of Indic scripts and their phonetic basis.

It's simply called Simpli.

Durgesh Rao, a research scientist at the National Centre for Software
Technology in Juhu, Mumbai, worked on the "intelligent multi-layered
input scheme for phonetic scripts" together with colleagues Shrinath
Shanghag and R.K. Joshi.

"There's still work to be done to make Simpli a product," Rao told
IANS.

"I conceived the idea on November 21, 2001, in Bangalore and discussed
it with Joshi and Shrinath. It was implemented by Shrinath in
consultation with Joshi and me, and we wrote it up for a conference in
February 2002."

He was referring to the SmartGraphics conference last June in
Hawthorne, New York.

"It was very well received. The scientific phonetic basis of Indic
languages and the intricacy of the scripts was an eye opener for many
in the audience," said Rao.

This solution could be useful for a compact virtual keyboard. It could
also snugly fit into any handheld devices such as the Simputer (a
sharable, low-cost computing device), the PDA (personal digital
assistants) and a cell phone, using a stylus or touch screen.

Rao admitted that it would be "difficult to say" how expensive or
inexpensive the product would be.

"This is not yet a product but a proof of concept prototype. We want
this concept to reach a very wide audience in product form and are
exploring the most effective ways and means to do that," said Rao.

Their work basically offers a new scheme for the input of phonetic
scripts with a stylus on a compact smart soft keyboard. This means
that tiny mobile devices don't need huge keyboards to cater to the
many diverse alphabets that Indian languages and other non-English
languages have.

Instead, by combining groups of related Indian language alphabets
together, a virtual or soft keyboard is used to speedily input
non-English text into tiny computing or mobile devices.

It is widely recognised that computers cater more readily to English
or Roman-script based languages.

This poses special challenges to languages with diverse scripts,
especially the seemingly complex Indian language scripts that have a
greater variety of alphabets and different ways of combining joint
alphabets.

In the new method, phonetically related characters are grouped into
layers and become dynamically available when the "group-leader"
character is accessed or touched.

"This scheme allows rapid input using taps and flicks. We have
developed a prototype for Devnagari which covers the complete script
using just 21 virtual keys, and preliminary tests indicate it is very
easy to use with little or no training," said the team.

In English, a conventional soft keyboard is a graphical representation
of a desktop keyboard on the screen, activated by tapping keys with a
stylus. In a soft keyboard all alphabets are visible on the screen.
The shift key is merely a mechanism to change case.

But, as Rao and team note: "For an equivalent Indic keyboard, many
alphabets are hidden in the shift positions. The hidden alphabets are
hard to guess, which makes such keyboards hard for 'hunt and peck' as
is common for Latin-based scripts."

Their new "smart soft keyboard" has three layers -- the alphabet
layer, the symbol layer and the number layer. It operates in two
modes, the alphabet mode and the numeric mode.
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