The buzz around Windows Phone 7 has been growing louder. This time the talking point is its keyboard, which increases typing accuracy for users.
Eric Badger, developer lead, Windows Phone 7 team, says, “We wanted to have the best text-input solution in the world. When it comes to digital communication, the task of getting an idea from your head to the keyboard is really important.”
The most striking part of the keyboard is the ‘Next Likely Key’, which is shown enlarged by the software. With keys shown bigger, users are likely to type words correctly.
In future versions of the keyboard, the keys will also take speed of typing into account.
The program, however, will not make suggestions if you don’t want it to. For example, when there is an unfamiliar word, the software doesn’t suggest any letter at all.
The Windows Phone 7 keyboard is a nice combination of machine learning and mathematics, and the result is mostly accurate text prediction. Some times, the next word is predicted by the keyboard even before users have begun typing. Languages follow a pattern and the Windows Phone 7 keyboard understands it well.
Most of the work on the Windows Phone 7 keyboard, which is to be launched soon, has been done by the Microsoft Research team.