Voice Key Board: Multimodal Indic Text Input
- Prasenjit Dey ,
- Rahul Ajmera ,
- RNV Sitaram ,
- Kalika Bali
Proceedings of The Eleventh International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces and The Sixth Workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction, USA, in November 2009 |
Multimodal systems, incorporating more natural input modalities
like speech, hand gesture, facial expression etc., can make humancomputer-
interaction more intuitive by drawing inspiration from
spontaneous human-human-interaction. We present here a
multimodal input device for Indic scripts called the Voice Key
Board (VKB) which offers a simpler and more intuitive method
for input of Indic scripts. VKB exploits the syllabic nature of Indic
language scripts and exploits the user’s mental model of Indic
scripts wherein a base consonant character is modified by
different vowel ligatures to represent the actual syllabic character.
We also present a user evaluation result for VKB comparing it
with the most common input method for the Devanagari script,
the InScript keyboard. The results indicate a strong user
preference for VKB in terms of input speed and learnability.
Though VKB starts with a higher user error rate compared to
InScript, the error rate drops by 55% by the end of the
experiment, and the input speed of VKB is found to be 81% higher
than InScript. Our user study results point to interesting research
directions for the use of multiple natural modalities for Indic text
input.