Alternative 'TouchType' Text Input Approach
Tuesday, May 12, 2009 at 6:05PM touchtype proposes a new approach to text input on a touchscreen. It takes predictive text to another level — suggesting a list of words which you are probably going to type next. With each letter you input, the list is updated. The application is not yet available, so I've not had an opportunity to play with it, but it does look reasonably good.
However, it seems to me that treating touchscreens like a real-world keyboards is flawed from the start. This is because the strengths of touchscreens is hi-resolution, real time positioning data for any finger dragging along the glass. The weaknesses of touchscreens is that initial point of touch — the system basically has to a) second guess where you meant to touch b) second guess that you mean to tap at all. I would propose an interaction where you only lift your fingers for unusual events, and design the system to be almost totally controlled from dragging on an XY plane. Swype gets closer to this idea of continuous input — we're well overdue for a change, as I've written about before.
Keyboard, Touch, iPhone, interaction, predictive, touchscreen in Trends
Reader Comments (15)
The novel keyboard layout in this application is absurd. Two vertical columns of alpha-sorted characters?
Is this targetted to first-time users, not only of hand-held devices, but of *keyboards*?
Not to mention that the mental load of a non-stop wordsearch exercise must be exhausting.
Oh, and to not sound like a total downer, I agree that Swype is definitely a step in the right direction. :)
Thanks Vance, I agree — it's is quite an 'alternative' input design, which seems to ignore the ingrained qwerty learning.
Watching this video, I just realized that predictive-sentence abilities are quite different than predictive-word abilities.
Normally the system predicts the word we are typing using the letters one has given so far.
If systems like this one analyze all the sentences we have typed in the past in order to guess where we might be taking the sentence at hand, it could potentially cause problems in composition skills, as we might sort of say the same things, in the same way, all the time, since that would be the "easiest."
Though, for mobile and quick-correspondence use, next-word prediction would be a definite win.
@Guy — if you've not seen the demo of Google's Wave, it's got incredibly impressive word correction, because it's using all english usage on the web. I guess that means it'll mix up theirs and there's :-)
@Guy,
That's an interesting point about sentence correction causing monotones and ... just bad writing. But part of me wonders if maybe that's ok, or even for the best, because it might make reading and writing a lot easier. It would essentially be forcing a simplified language on us all. I'm not sure that's a bad thing. I'm absolutely in favor of working out some of the confusing kinks and warts English has developed over the centuries.
@Keith,
The fascinating thing about where Google and Wave's correction fails is that, for the first time, it's giving us real data about what parts of English suck in practice. I mean we've always of known that their/there or to/too are confusing, but this gives us more insight into how bad they are. Plus it's objective data, of real people, so hopefully there will be less "you're stupid because you can't figure out your" name calling.
Maybe once this sort of thing is more concretely know, there will be enough cause to actually doing something about it -- like relaxing grammatical rules. (Kind of how "their" is an acceptable genderless pronoun today).
That is indeed very close to the Japanese input systems already existing on any standard phone here in Japan.
Japanese input is as follows:
"sounds" are traditionally organized in syllables in a 5 x 10 matrix.
5 is for the 5 vowels "a, i, u, e, o" and 10 is for the consonants "nothing, k, s, t, n, h, m, y, r, w", with a number of spaces in the matrix that do not correspond to syllables used in modern Japanese (ye, yi, wi, wu, we) plus one extra (n).
Each of the 10 key is assigned a consonant.
hitting the key once brings the "a" entry, twice the "i" entry, three times the "u" entry etc. The number comes in last position.
once a series of syllables composing a word is entered, the syllables must be converted to a semantic version of the word, composed of chinese characters. Each series can have multiple chinese characters equivalent, so one has to run through a list of propositions before finding the right set of chinese characters.
Once that is done, one can proceed with the next word.
Some words can be expressed only as syllables.
So, what matters as far as Japanese input is concerned is:
1) predict the next syllable from the preceding syllable (and word)
2) predict the correct chinese character "set" equivalent from the syllable set and form the preceding word
3) predict the next word
Since typing messages is one of the main use of phones, the quality of predictive input is a huge factor when getting a phone. But since most systems are top notch, competition happens on other aspects of the phones.
Thanks Jean-Christophe
You bring up a good point — that alternative input methods already exist for non-Roman character languages.
Interestingly, Apple's recent WWDC announcements showed that it's now possible to input chinese character text by drawing on a Mac laptop's trackpad.
Keith,
Those have been existing for a while here too :)
The point here is that Apple is advertising for a CJK (seemingly) specific aspect, in English, at the WWDC.
Now Apple is considering the CJK market not as an afterthought but as a real target. I tried the Japanese input on iPhones (I don't own one) and it is better than the one on OSX and sometimes more intuitive than the traditional input methods I described above.
Apple is really trying to make OSX the best multilingual system on the market. As far as I am concerned, they are already. But the touchscreen is really an opportunity to make the multilingual/non-latin-1 experience even better.
You might also like to take a look at ShapeWriter (http://www.shapewriter.com/ ), which looks very similar to Swype, but is already on the market. I have it on my iPhone, and love it!
Thanks Rich — yes Shapewriter is pretty cool. I find deleting mistakes to be the most time expensive part of the interaction.
The Phraze-It Keyboard is a user interface for touch screens. Each control key has displayed on it one of the five vowels A E I O and U. Typing a vowel key enables typing either that vowel or the 3 - 5 vowels following in the alphabet A - B C D or E - F G H etc.). It is very intuitive and enables typing with your fingers on large on-screen keys. With the Phraze-It Keyboard, you are typing with your index finger or thumb. The Phraze-It Keyboard is an entire computer keyboard implemented with a reduced number of large keys for your touch screen phone.
I have been using this App ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzEKQh9zytI ) It was such a smooth transition for me migrate from T9 to Adpatxt, i generally dont look at Text input apps, but i could empathize with your ppl here..... happy texting.
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