作者：Parham Aarabi

我们在手机设备上最经常做的事就是打字。面对这么多不同的手机键盘，再加上下周苹果可能会对键盘的重新设计做出决定（或至少宣布允许第三方键盘），现在正是认识一些先进的手机键盘界面的好时机。

智能键盘

在过去几年，有若干种独特的键盘界面在用户中广受欢迎。以Nuance于2011年收购的Swype为例，用户可以像平常一样接触按键或者手指不离开屏幕，连续输入完毕后放开，该键盘就会自动识别要输入的字母。这种键盘很强大很方便（本人使用的就是这一种）。还有其他例子，如Syntellia的Fleksy键盘、Whirlscape的Minuum以及类似于Swype的SwiftKey。这些键盘的“魔力”是，它们假设用户输入存在误差（或对于Swype和SwiftKey而言的手势错误），然后通过计算这个误差找到最可能的词。在大多数时候，这些智能键盘比传统键盘更实用。比如Minuum占用的屏幕空间非常小，这是它的额外优点。

phone-keyboard(from venturebeat)

动态键盘

这种键盘不是主流，它能根据最可能的字母动态地改变键盘。简单地说，它就是根据各个字母的使用频率来改变各个字母的大小。

keyboard(from venturebeat)

以剑桥大学的研究团队制作的Dasher键盘为例，用户从一连串动态改变大小的字母序列中选择自己要输入的字母。尽管这可能不是最快的输入方式，但适用于无法多个手指同时打字的情况（如Google Glass）。

另一个不得不提的例子是Tactus。这是一种可以动态地凸出凹入的物理触屏键盘，使玩家获得键盘的真实触感。这种界面是否能获得主流欢迎，仍然有待观察，不过它确实是一种有趣的键盘。

无键盘的键盘

输入文字的方法可能与键盘完全无关。例如，我们在多伦多大学开发了一种名为“Extended Touch”的界面，用户可以在手机设备所在的任何表面上轻敲，根据特殊的振动和声音，我们可以检测到被敲击的准确位置。尽管理论上这种核心的敲击检测技术是可行的，但仍然面临一些需要克服的挑战。然而，也许在将来，这种界面（即敲击任何表面）与键盘相结合的文字输入法能够投入使用。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

What the future of mobile keyboards will look like

by Parham Aarabi

It’s the one thing that we do most on mobile devices that often is the most annoying: typing.  With so many different kinds of mobile keyboards, and perhaps a pending keyboard redesign from Apple debuting next week (or at least an announcement allowing third-party keyboards), it’s a good time to consider some recent (and a few not-so-recent) advances in mobile keyboard interfaces.

Intelligent Keyboards

Over the past few years, several unique keyboard interfaces have garnered significant attention and popularity. Swype, acquired by Nuance in 2011, is one such example, where users type by either touching the keys as usual or by making continuous touch gestures that cover the letters of a word. The result is surprisingly robust and user friendly (side note: this is the keyboard I personally use). There are other options, such as the Fleksy keyboard by Syntellia, or the Minuum flattened keyboard by Whirlscape, as well as SwiftKey, a very popular keyboard that is similar to Swype. The “magic” with these keyboards is that they assume user touches have a spatial error (or in the case of Swype and SwiftKey, a gestural error), and account for this when finding the most probable word. In almost all cases, these intelligent keyboards work better than their traditional counterparts. In the case of Minuum, there is an added benefit that the keyboard takes up very little space on the screen.

Dynamic Keyboards

Although not mainstream, there has been work in the area of keyboards that dynamically change based on what letters are most probable. In the simplest context, this could be visualized as a keyboard where the size of the individual keys are scaled according to the usage frequency of each letter.

A more interesting example is the Dasher keyboard (created by a research group at Cambridge University), where the user types by going through a continuous sequence of dynamically scaled letters (click here to see a quick demo). Although this may not be the fastest way of typing, it works well in situations where multi-finger typing is not possible (such as for Google Glass).
A discussion of dynamic keyboards isn’t complete without mentioning Tactus. Tactus creates physical touchscreen keyboards that can “pop-in” and out dynamically, which gives users a tactile feel for the keys. It remains to be seen whether such an interface will gain mainstream popularity, but it is certainly interesting.

Beyond Keyboards

There are methods of entering text that may do away with the keyboard altogether. One such example that we have been developing at the University of Toronto is the Extended Touch interface. Here, a user can tap a location on any surface that a mobile device is placed on, and based on the unique vibrations and sounds, we detect the exact location tapped. Although the core tap detection technology works reasonably well, there are several important challenges that will need to be overcome. However, it is possible in the future that such an interface (i.e. typing on any surface) combined with a probabilistic keyboard will make a viable method for text entry.(source:venturebeat)