When to type, talk, or Swype: Characterizing energy consumption of mobile input modalities

Mobile device users use applications that require text input. Today there are three primary text input modalities, soft keyboard (SK), speech to text (STT) and Swype. Each of these input modalities have different energy demands, and as a result, their use will have a significant impact on the battery life of the mobile device. Using high-precision power measurement hardware and systematically taking into account the user context, we characterize and compare the energy consumption of these three text input modalities. We show that the length of interaction determines the most energy efficient modality. If the interactions is short, on average less than 30 characters, using the device SK is the most energy efficient. For longer interactions, the use of a STT applications is more energy efficient. Swype is more energy efficient than STT for very short interactions, less than 5 characters on average, but is never as efficient as SK. This is primarily due to STT enabling the users to complete tasks more quickly than when using SK or Swype. We also show that these results are independent of “user style”, the experience of using different input modalities and device characteristics. Finally we show that STT energy efficiency is dependent on application logic of whether speech samples are for a given period of time before transmitting to a server for analysis as opposed to streaming the speech to a sever for analysis. Based on these observations we recommend that the users should use SK for short interactions of less than 30 characters, and STT for longer interactions. In addition, they should use STT applications which uses storing and transmit logic, if they are willing to trade off battery life to QoE. Finally we proposed the development of an adaptive storing and analyze STT to improve the energy efficiency of it.