Frederick Noronha elaborates on the latest solution that leverages the strengths of Indic scripts and cellphones, called Simpli. According to its developer, Durgesh Rao, Simpli can be an attractive alternate input option for other phonetic scripts on personal computers

Localisation to Indic scripts is a major task due to significant differences from Latin-based scripts and writing systems, says DurGesh Rao

Indian languages are too complex to make it to the computer keyboard or make the most of the power of cellphones, right? Wrong! A Mumbai-based team of scientists have worked out an innovative solution using a strong dose of lateral thinking, that leverages the strengths of Indic scripts and their phonetic basis. Aptly, called Simpli.

Durgesh Rao, till recently a research scientist at the erstwhile National Centre for Software Technology in Mumbai (this institution has since then become CDAC, Mumbai) worked on the intelligent multi-layered input scheme for phonetic scripts together with Shrinath Shanbhag and R K Joshi. “I conceived the idea in November 2001 at Bangalore, and later discussed it with Prof. Joshi and Shrinath. It was implemented by Shrinath and we wrote it up for the conference in February 2002,” elaborates Rao. “There’s still work to be done to make Simpli a product,” he adds.

This solution could be useful for a compact virtual keyboard. It could also snugly fit into any handheld device such as the Simputer, PDAs (personal digital assistants) or cellphone, using a stylus or touch screen.

“It can also be an attractive alternate input option for Indic and other phonetic scripts on personal computers, since it is very intuitive and requires minimal training,” says Rao.

Rao admitted that it would be “difficult to say” how expensive or inexpensive this product would be. “This is not yet a product, but a proof-of-concept prototype. We want the concept to reach a wide audience in a complete product format, and are exploring the most effective ways and means to do that,” said Rao.

Simpli basically offers a new scheme for the input of phonetic scripts with a stylus, on a compact, smart, 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.

Complex scripts
As most personal computers are programmed for the English or Roman script, it poses special challenges to languages with diverse scripts, especially the seemingly complex Indian language scripts, which have a greater variety of alphabets and different ways of combining joined alphabets.

In this innovative 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 that it is easy to use with little or no training,” said the developers.

Innovators say this scheme seems to be optimal for compact keyboarding of phonetic scripts, such as Indic, on handheld and mobile devices. It can be extended to other phonetic scripts like IPA as well.

“It can also be used equally well as an alternate, simpler soft keyboard for conventional desktop systems,” says its inventors. Rao and his team point out that mobile computing devices are now a part of life. But these devices largely communicate via text, meaning that all such devices need compact, quick and easy-to-use text input schemes.

Because of their size, keyboards are not particularly amenable to mobile computing. So, stylus-based schemes exist for the Roman alphabet. Unfortunately no such device exists for Indic schemes. “Localisation to Indic scripts is a non-trivial task due to significant differences from Latin-based scripts and writing systems,” points out Rao. In the past, efforts have been undertaken to build standards-based architectures for Indic text representation and shaping.

But these architectures are primarily designed for desktop computing. “They can be adapted to work on mobile devices with one exception—the text input mechanism. Here we propose a new compact soft-keyboard based on principles of phonetic encoding, that can fill this gap,” said the developers.

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 QWERTY keyboard all alphabets are visible on the screen. The shift key is merely a mechanism to change the case.

But, as Rao admits, “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.”

There’s one additional challenge—the small display area of screen on mobile devices. “Displaying a 12 column by 5 row keyboard takes up significant screen space. The resulting keys are small and hard to use,” notes the scientists working on the Indic solution.

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

“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, referring to the time he presented this product at a SmartGraphics conference last June in New York.