@inproceedings{dey2009voice, author = {Dey, Prasenjit and Ajmera, Rahul and Sitaram, RNV and Bali, Kalika}, title = {Voice Key Board: Multimodal Indic Text Input}, booktitle = {Proceedings of The Eleventh International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces and The Sixth Workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction, USA, in November 2009}, year = {2009}, month = {November}, abstract = {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.}, url = {http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/research/publication/voice-key-board-multimodal-indic-text-input/}, edition = {Proceedings of The Eleventh International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces and The Sixth Workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction, USA, in November 2009}, }