HP India's gesture "keyboard" for pen entry

Those of us working with the Roman alphabet forget how spoiled we are with our QWERTY keyboards, even if they were originally designed to slow us down. People using non-Roman characters never forget that these keyboards weren't designed for them, and have spent decades searching for alternatives. The latest, developed by HP Labs India, is the gesture-based keyboard, which is actually a pen tablet that uses a stroke-based system to recognize characters in non-Roman languages. It was designed specifically to deal with languages in use in the subcontinent, such as Tamil and Kannada, but has potential for other Asian languages as well. The system was designed to be rugged, and to be usable by people with no prior experience with keyboards or the Roman alphabet. HP expects to license the technology to a third-party manufacturer for commercialization.

[asah wu @ Mar 17th 2006 11:09AM]

we've had these pads in asia for years now. i bought one when i was in taiwan about five years ago to write chinese with.

[Dermot81 @ Mar 17th 2006 11:48AM]

lol I bet none of you have ever heard of the language Kannada, but I speak it and I'm glad to see its getting some publicity :)

[mode_m @ Mar 17th 2006 12:08PM]

...and soon HP plans to release colour photo technology.

On a serious note though, this is pretty cool.

[SideSwipe @ Mar 17th 2006 12:24PM]

LOL #3 - seriously... "Stand perfectly still for the next twenty-seven minutes."

[IK47 @ Mar 17th 2006 12:38PM]

umm, the chinese have been doing this for YEARS.

how is this, in anyway, news?

[nigwil @ Mar 17th 2006 1:08PM]

"...even if they were originally designed to slow us down"

Some consider this claim false:

http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/whyqwert.html

[Ravana @ Mar 17th 2006 1:15PM]

Dermot81

That makes 2 of us!

[tino @ Mar 17th 2006 1:58PM]

Why is the picture taken in the 60s?

[BK @ Mar 17th 2006 2:04PM]

"People using non-Roman characters never forget that these keyboards weren't designed for them"

Yea, they just need to press SHIFT-4 to realize this... ;-)

[sridhar @ Mar 17th 2006 2:30PM]

tamil and kannada. holler.

[Bobby @ Mar 17th 2006 3:37PM]

LoL, I didn't know they had LCD panels back in the 60's

[Av4rice @ Mar 17th 2006 4:36PM]

#1 is correct. This is old news.

[Bobby @ Mar 17th 2006 4:57PM]

Have to agree with number one, bought me a pad when I was in China, 6 years back. Pitty I lost the cd with all the software.

[Kingsley @ Mar 20th 2006 7:41PM]

I use a transliterated keyboard for தமிழ் now that feels almost natural. I wonder if the retraining for gesture recognition is really useful?

[Narsimhan @ Mar 22nd 2006 7:18AM]

This is a very good tool for vernacular community.

[Sascha @ Apr 11th 2006 7:30AM]

Lately, we in Europe or America have a similar technique for entering text in non-keyboard situations. It is called for example "graffiti" - pen-gestures representing textual characters. Not so new, that idea... :)