Voice key board

Multimodal systems, incorporating more natural input modalities like speech, hand gesture, facial expression etc., can make human-computer-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.