Design and Evaluation of Soft Keyboards for Brahmic Scripts

Despite being spoken by a large percentage of the world, Indic languages in general lack user-friendly and efficient methods for text input. These languages have poor or no support for typing. Soft keyboards, because of their ease of installation and lack of reliance on specific hardware, are a promising solution as an input device for many languages. Developing an acceptable soft keyboard requires the frequency analysis of characters in order to design a layout that minimizes text-input time. This article proposes the use of various development techniques, layout variations, and evaluation methods for the creation of soft keyboards for Brahmic scripts. We propose that using optimization techniques such as genetic algorithms and multi-objective Pareto optimization to develop multi-layer keyboards will increase the speed at which text can be entered.

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