ThaiFlick: Flicked Keyboard on Mobile Devices for Thai using Phoneme Matching

Composing messages with virtual keyboard is a challenging task especially for Thai messages. There are too many Thai characters to fit a mobile keyboard. Screens of smartphones are so small that those having big fingers frequently tap on undesired keys. Additionally, some common Thai words are frequently misspelt such as “อนุญาต”— to permit, which is usually spelt as “อนุญาติ”. This thesis introduces a Thai keyboard layout that helps improve typing performance on smartphones. It adopts Japanese Flicked layout along with intuitive key arrangement based on character arrangement in Thai words. In addition, it provides word suggestion based on the sound of the entered characters. Users can just type characters having the same sound of the desired character without correctly typing all required characters. Our experiments show that ThaiFlick outperforms the existing Ketmanee keyboard layout on mobile devices by 53.60% in word suggestion.