HP Labs India

A keyboard for Kannada

Deccan Herald
February 07, 2006

A device consisting of a keypad with Kannada alphabets and a special pen to modify the base alphabets has been developed by Shekhar Borgaokar and his team. This Gesture Keyboard can help take computers to the remotest part of Karnataka, says Bharathi Prabhu.

In a society that is becoming increasingly dependent on computers for many of its functions, English as the medium of interface between user and computer poses a problem. Millions in our country use their own languages for even business communication. Internet access and other computer related activities are becoming increasingly essential for those who know, say, only Kannada. Search engines provide data in a few Indian languages but to access the web pages one needs to know English. Kannada transliteration software are available and being used for desktop processing activities but they are a bit cumbersome and also require the knowledge of English.

Modifiers

If the interface were to be in their own mother tongues, more Indians would become computer literate. The regular QWERTY keyboard is suitable for alphabetic languages like English where modifiers are very few. Indian languages are phonetic/ syllabic in nature. They have about 30-40 consonants and vowels and 12-15 modifiers (kagunitha or matras). Each character in an Indian language would require approximately two keys to be pressed, one for the base consonant and one for the phonetic modifier. Apart from being difficult to learn, the keyboard would be huge. Why not have handwriting recognition software, one might ask. But handwriting recognition software are very complex and the margin of error in handwriting recognition is high.

This is where Gesture Keyboard provides a seemingly simple answer. This device consisting of a keypad with Indian language alphabets and a special pen with which you modify the base alphabets has been developed by Shekhar Borgaokar and his team working in HP Labs, India. Shekhar's dream of taking computers to the masses has now turned into a reality with ‘Gesture Keyboard’.

The Kannada gesture Keyboard for instance has all the vowels and consonants of Kannada. As mentioned earlier, providing the whole Kannada Kagunitha is not practical as unlike in English where 26 alphabets can spell the entire gamut of words, Kannada would require more than 1500 combination of keys! The soft ware recognises the Kannada letter being keyed in and displays it on the screen. One only needs to make ‘gestures’ on the pad, no complex shift/ alt manoeuvre. A tap on the intended letter and writing the modifier with the special pen makes it possible for you to write anything in Kannada. For example, you tap the alphabet Ka and then write the modifiers to get kaa, ki, ku etc …(I tried srishti and vignana and subsequently ‘tap wrote’ a couple of sentences). By giving the search words in Kannada, web pages with Kannada material can also be accessed.

Easy to learn

Says Borgaonkar, “The learning curve is really fast here. People type 10-15 words per minute after only 15 minutes of training. I envisage the availability of this device even in internet kiosks across small towns, where villagers can come and book their tickets, check the price for their produce or search the net for information.”

Truly one more step in narrowing the digital divide.

Gesture Key Board has also been developed in Hindi and Tamil.

Large scale manufacturing is yet to begin and the cost of the Gesture key board would be around Rs 2000. System requirements are Windows OS 2000 + Office 2003. Linux version of Gesture Keyboard is under development.

Contact: Shekhar Borgaonkar, Department manager — Access devices Program, HP Labs India, Bangalore. Ph: 25042216, 9845518522.

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