Some smartphones are making Qwerty keyboards go the way of the typewriter.
In the future, your smartphone won't auto-correct your errors. It will correct them before they're even made.
It will know you really meant to hit the "K" key on your screen when you hit the "L" key. Maybe even one day, there won't be a traditional keyboard at all, if some entrepreneurs have their way.
While Google Inc. and Apple Inc. go after ways to make it easier to talk to your phone, a new fleet of scientists, startups and app developers are still attacking the problem of typing and input�perfecting how to understand what you want to type rather than what you literally typed.
Typing Prototypes- PREDICTIVE: Using naturallanguage processing, this technology takes cues from your typing history, Web presence and other elements to determine what you're trying to type and automatically predict words.
- GESTURE: Rather than using a traditional keyboard, this technology relies on nontypical gestures like gliding your finger or tapping regions of the screen, and determines what you're typing using what it knows about your habits.
- VOICE: Forget the keyboard �voice input uses technology to automatically (though sometimes clumsily) translate what you are saying into text and use that as your input, like Apple's Siri technology
Google lets developers build heavily customized keyboards for smartphones running its Android mobile operating system. That has opened the floodgates for startups like SwiftKey, which builds a predictive Android keyboard that tries to anticipate what a user is trying to type, and Snapkeys, a futuristic-style keyboard that consists of only four keys, to remake the keyboard on Android smartphones.
Gesture-based typing and predictive typing has been around for some time�SwiftKey was founded in 2008, for example. But the technology behind it has become so sophisticated that it is now becoming a selling point as smartphone makers take on Apple's iPhone.
Case in point, Samsung Electronics Co. will include SwiftKey's predictive technology in the new Samsung Galaxy S 4, which will be unveiled at an event in New York on Thursday, according to a person familiar with the matter.
"In the Android space where you have a lot of competition, a little thing like [predictive typing] can make a huge difference," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group.
This is more than a scientific question�it is a business one, too. Smartphone manufacturers want to reduce the time, or "friction" needed to input data, as a way of freeing up users to do more browsing, buying, and watching.
Mr. Enderle said the use of the standard Qwerty keyboard on the iPhone made such an approach the industry standard. But that won't last long, he said.
New-wave keyboards work to "infer" what the user is trying to type. They use evidence collected about the user, like typing history on social networks, where they are on the Web, or what terms are trending on the Web to determine what word to select next.
SwiftKey takes that one step further. "The way we do this is essentially by modeling the surface of the keyboard as a series of probability distributions," said Ben Medlock, chief technology officer at TouchType Ltd., the U.K. company behind SwiftKey. In other words, it knows where on a screen you are most likely to tap when pressing a certain key. Eventually, it will recognize that you mean to hit a "W," not a "Q."
SwiftKey is consistently among the top paid applications in the Android ecosystem and has been downloaded more than 15 million times. SwiftKey also licenses its technology to serve as the back-end processing for keyboards, such as the new BlackBerry Z10.
Natural language processing�the technology that powers SwiftKey�goes beyond just typing and has applications in other areas, like search. Facebook Inc.'s new search engine Graph Search uses it to understand what, exactly, people are seeking. Facebook also employs linguists that are constantly checking what users are searching for, and making sure Graph Search can account for those results.
SwiftKey SwiftKeySwiftKey finds the spot that a person taps when trying to type a letter, seen above and top.
"If you think about it, a keyword approach is going to miss a lot of subtleties�if you just type in "photos, Katherine," you might mean photos of Katherine, photos by Katherine, or photos Katherine is tagged in," said Amy Campbell, a linguist at Facebook. "There are a lot of ways to type that both in keywords and language, and it is important for us to deliver results that match their intent."
Snapkeys, an Israeli-based startup, takes things further by wiping out the traditional keyboard altogether. The experience is more akin to texting on an older cellphone, in which multiple letters were assigned to a single key.
Instead, the keyboard consists of four "keys" that represent three commonly-used letters each, and doesn't show letters that aren't often used. The idea is that small screens on devices like smartphones were never meant to have a full keyboard, so users should be able to see more of the screen when typing and interacting.
"Today our interaction on small devices are limited to a keyboard and a text box�nothing else beyond that," said Benjamin Ghassabian, CEO and founder of SnapKeys Ltd. "When you are interacting with someone, you don't see anything else�no images, no videos, no games, nothing is there. We are going to change that."
Only letters that are used more than 80% of the time are shown, and the rest of the keys are hidden to keep the user experience crisp, Mr. Ghassabian said. (The Z key is the least-frequently used, followed closely by the X key.) He says the system is up to three times faster than a traditional keyboard.
Google also has its own stylized predictive keyboard, which it introduced in a recent version of Android, called Gesture Typing. Users glide their finger over letters to build words, and the keyboard can anticipate what's next.
It still remains to be seen whether Apple will respond to the demand for next-generation keyboards. Unlike Google, it hasn't opened up its typing interface for experimentation from outside programmers. "We don't believe this would be the best customer experience," said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris.
Added Dr. Medlock: "I think at the time, even the guys at Google didn't realize what an advantage it was going to be to have this differentiable input experience. Maybe if Apple could go back, given what we know now, they would do it differently."
—Yun-Hee Kim contributed to this article.Write to Matthew Lynley at matthew.lynley@wsj.com
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