Text Entry in Indian Languages on Mobile: User Perspectives

Recently several new solutions have emerged for text entry in Indic languages out ongoing research in this area. The practical challenges for text entry solutions for Indic language are completely different from those of standard roman keyboard solutions. One of the primary challenge is the adoption and practical usage of these by the potential users. In order to understand the practical pain points, needs, expectations and usage patterns of the users, we conducted a field user study. The scale of the study involved 50 participants from the preferred user group who could type in 6 different Indic language scripts. We also performed subjective evaluation of four different keyboards that are relevant for Indian smart phone users in terms of user performance and their preferences. Our observations and insights drawn from this study would go into improvement suggestions and design recommendations for text entry solutions for Indic languages.