The design of Khmer word-based predictive non-QWERTY soft keyboard for stylus-based devices

We introduce a first ever soft keyboard for stylus-based devices such as personal digital assistant (PDA) for Khmer, official language of Cambodia. The contribution of this study is twofold - a key layout arrangement and a word-based predictive text entry method. First, we design a non-QWERTY key layout in which consonants and vowels are grouped phonetically and orthographically, respectively. As a result, the number of soft keys is much less than that of Khmer character sets. Second, we present a word-based predictive text entry method based on the careful analysis of the structure of Khmer word composition. In spite of the word-based predictive mechanism, this soft keyboard provides as well the ability to input unknown words without swapping to other modes. A prototype has been developed and preliminary experiment shows that the proposed soft keyboard is user-friendly easy to use with little training. In addition to the application to stylus-based devices, it can also be extended to be a soft keyboard for conventional desktop.