A Sinhala Predictive Text Input System for Android Devices

Abstract

Nowadays sending messages using Short Message Service (SMS) is very popular among Sri Lankan mobile phone users. Most of the people use transliterated format to send SMSs in Sinhala. Currently there is no proper Sinhala input system available to send SMSs in Sinhala for devices using the Android operating system. The main objective of this research is to develop a Sinhala predictive text input system for Android devices. It was clearly identified that developing a predictive input system using built-in application has more advantages than developing a standalone application. Therefore a predictive input system for Sinhala language was developed using an open-source Scandinavian input method editor (IME) which is developed based on Android Latin IME (The standard keyboard provided by the Android). In addition to that a Sinhala keyboard layout is also developed by analyzing the Sinhala character usage. The evaluation shows that this predictive input system has 37.19% efficiency than using the input system without having prediction. The coverage of the keyboard layout is 94.9%.