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The Impact of Word, Multiple Word, and Sentence Input on Virtual Keyboard Decoding Performance

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Conference Object

Change log

Authors

Vertanen, Keith 
Fletcher, Crystal 
Gaines, Dylan 
Gould, Jacob 
Kristensson, PO 

Abstract

Entering text on non-desktop computing devices is often done via an onscreen virtual keyboard. Input on such keyboards normally consists of a sequence of noisy tap events that specify some amount of text, most commonly a single word. But is single word-at-a-time entry the best choice? This paper compares user performance and recognition accuracy of wordat- a-time, phrase-at-a-time, and sentence-at-a-time text entry on a smartwatch keyboard. We evaluate the impact of differing amounts of input in both text copy and free composition tasks. We found providing input of an entire sentence significantly improved entry rates from 26wpm to 32wpm while keeping character error rates below 4%. In offline experiments with more processing power and memory, sentence input was recognized with a much lower 2.0% error rate. Our findings suggest virtual keyboards can enhance performance by encouraging users to provide more input per recognition event.

Description

Keywords

Text entry, virtual keyboard, decoder, smartwatch

Journal Title

Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Syste s

Conference Name

ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery
Sponsorship
EPSRC (via University of Dundee) (7836a-CRT)
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/R004471/1)
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/N010558/1)
This work was supported by Google Faculty awards (K.V. and P.O.K.)