Governing shifted characters of Thai input method for smartphones

A typical Thai smartphone keyboard is somewhat hard to use. Unlike in English keyboard, a Thai keyboard must contain of 44 buttons for consonants and at least 18 more buttons for vowels. Because of the large number of characters in Thai language, the size of a button of each Thai character is smaller than that of an English character. Moreover, a change of keyboard layers occurs more often than in English keyboard. This change of layers is required addition keystrokes. Consequently the efficiency including speed and accuracy of typing with on-screen Thai keyboard is somewhat low due to the limited screen area of each buttons and the frequent changes of layers. In order to improve the typing efficiency, we will demonstrate some methods, including Multi tap, Hold, Swipe and Layer addition to handle the shifted character in Thai language, as well as finding the new approach. The study will also identify the factors that create difficulties in typing for each keyboard style. The statistical results presented in this paper will also be helpful for further development.