Indic input standards development for smart touch phones

Though, the Indic language support in basic phones existed from 2005, their usage is close to nil, due to lack of awareness, difficulties of entering Indic text and printing of Hindi characters on keypads meant for  non -Hindi areas.  For  Indic use in SMS, there were  no  standards for  encoding Indic text with GSM/CDMA technology.

IEEE-Standards Association has setup a  India Special Interest Group  with the objective of  spearheading the initiative to improve the contribution from Indian engineers in Standards development. As part of its software and IT sub group, a meeting was organised at Centre for Internet and Society(CIS), Bangalore  to  understand  the status of Indic on mobiles and brainstorm next steps on 24 Feb 2011.

Dr Nadeem from CEWIT, Vijay from Nokia, Dr Mahesh and Naveen J from Brahmi computing,Sunil Abraham and Nirmita Narasimhan, Sri Chandra and myself as volunteers of IEEE-SA attended the meeting. Sri Chandra briefed the participants about the IEEE-SA initiative.

Dr Nadeem presented work done as part of the broadband consortium during the last year towards input, storage, rendering of indic text. The scope included only the basic phones with 12 key keypad and simple input methods without reliance on word dictionaries. The team came up with an intutive input method in the usual alphabetic order of script and switching in of additional layers to speed up data entry to access frequently occurring letters. He also gave away hardcopies of the recommendation to the attendees. He said that he plans to share the recommendation in a larger forum and encourage the vendors to adopt the standard.

After extensive brainstorming on indic input methods status,  it is agreed that touch phones will become the key for extensive use of Indic languages. As touch phones become affordable at price points of less than 5000 Rupees, developing a input standard for them can help in speeding up deployment. The touch phone also does not have limitation on number of keys, so even simple methods can be easy to use. The firmware changes for phones already with public can also be done easily. Sunil from CIS offered to help  promote from policy angle by working with Government apart from hosting future events at CIS.

IEEE-SA as an established leader in standards development, can help the industry through a time tested standard development process, which can protect IP of participants and also help in faster development of standard. The team felt that we are at right point in time to work on the standard and help enable mobile services for Indians in their own languages.

When will we have Inscript Mobile?

CDAC has released Inscript 5.1 proposal (requires user details form submission at the site) arrived after discussions with Microsoft IBM and Redhat. The new proposal enhances the Inscript to latest Unicode standard 5.1, by providing backward compatibility with mappings for for ZWJ, ZWNJ and an extended layer to encode the new character codes. The toggle key for basic to extended layers is not defined. Another proposal is to make the mapping language specific rather than script. For the Telugu language, my feedback is that Indo-Arabic numerals need to be retained as default rather than Telugu numerals.

However smart mobiles will become commonplace than PCs in 21st century, this standard is inadequate as most mobiles have keypads with about 35 keys for typing. As the computers are powerful, what is needed is a clever way to accommodate the most practically used letters of the language on this keyboard. As most users are bilingual, phonetic approaches make it convenient for new users to easily switch between the languages. Phonetic based schemes with dictionary support for word hinting from Microsoft and Google are now available for PC. Alternative statistical based input method approaches are becoming available with mobile phones targeting basic 12 keys models. Tirumalakrishna Desikachary has defined one Phonetic keyboard (released along with a font called Pothana) for Telugu language 10 years back. In this short and long forms of vowel are assigned to the same key. Vowel keys are treated as independent vowels if they appear first in the word and as dependent vowels (or matras of the preceding consonant) if they appear after the first letter of the word. This avoids wasting of keys for representing matra forms of vowels. This still uses 2 keys beyond the basic alphabet to accommodate 4 Telugu letters. Out of that only one (letter au) is in popular use and that when it is interchanged with chandrabindu, all the letters that are in popular use are accommodated on the English alphabet keys. Similar arrangement can be worked out for Hindi and other languages based on the initial proposals of Desikachary.
Compared to other phonetic methods like Itrans and RTS, Pothana keeps the mapping simple one to one except for the overloading of vowel keys based on the context. It is desirable to have standard for Phonetic input on mobiles to enable the IT revolution to benefit the masses.