Texting Is Too Slow? Draw Your Words! | Texting Slow? Draw Words!

By Roland Piquepaille

Admit it, typing an SMS on a cell phone takes time, and writing an e-mail on a PDA is only marginally better. But according to the San Jose Mercury News, a researcher at IBM has found a solution to this vexing problem. Instead of typing words on these ridiculous small keyboards, with the SHARK, an abbreviation for ShortHand-Aided Rapid Keyboarding, you use a grid and a stylus. The grid appears on the screen of your portable device. You put a stylus on the first letter of the word you want to type. Then you drag the stylus to draw a line connecting all the other letters of the word. When you release the stylus, the word appears almost magically. With SHARK, you can type between 50 and 80 words per minute, which is almost miraculous. So far, IBM hasn't yet decided to release this software as a product. But if enough of you download it, which is currently free, and say you want it, IBM could release it as a paying product within a few months.

Here is the introduction of the Mercury News article.

Humans in their long history have invented only two ways for individuals to produce text: handwriting and typing on a keyboard.

Shumin Zhai, an IBM scientist, may have invented another way: SHARK, an abbreviation for ShortHand-Aided Rapid Keyboarding.

SHARK is intended for writing text with a stylus on small touch-sensitive screens, such as those found in cell phones and personal digital assistants. It uses a radically different approach that is easy to learn and fast.

Here is how the system works. Below is a screen capture of a user trying to finishing to type "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." On this capture, the user is moving its stylus to create the word "jumps" (Credit: IBM Almaden Research Center).

If you want to see SHARK in action without downloading it, here is a link to a video demo (4 minutes and 24 seconds, 29.7 MB). The above image comes from this video.

Here is how the Mercury News describe the system.

To write a word, you put the stylus on the first letter of the word and then drag the stylus to draw a line through the alphabet cluster, touching every letter in the word. When you lift up the stylus after hitting the last letter, SHARK figures out what word you want and displays it on the screen.

If SHARK makes a mistake, you tap the word and get a list of the most likely alternatives based on the path you traced through the grid.

You can check the system by yourself, and even download a beta version on the IBM SHARK Shorthand web site.

CNET News.com also described the SHARK system last week in "New-age keyboard: Trace, don't write."

But for more technical information, here is a link to the recent publications of Shumin Zhai and his colleagues.

In particular, you should read "In Search of Effective Text Input Interfaces for Off the Desktop Computing" (PDF format, 18 pages, 255 KB).

For the moment, the system is only working with a database of English words. If IBM ever needs beta testers for a French version, I'm available. Typing text messages is just a nightmare right now...

Sources: Mike Langberg, San Jose Mercury News, July 15, 2005; and various web sites

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