Phrase-Gesture Typing on Smartphones

Abstract

We study phrase-gesture typing, a gesture typing method that allows users to type short phrases by swiping through all the letters of the words in a phrase using a single, continuous gesture. Unlike word-gesture typing, where text needs to be entered word by word, phrase-gesture typing enters text phrase by phrase. To demonstrate the usability of phrase-gesture typing, we implemented a prototype called PhraseSwipe. Our system is composed of a frontend interface designed specifically for typing through phrases and a backend phrase-level gesture decoder developed based on a transformer-based neural language model. Our decoder was trained using five million phrases of varying lengths of up to five words, chosen randomly from the Yelp Review Dataset. Through a user study with 12 participants, we demonstrate that participants could type using PhraseSwipe at an average speed of 34.5 WPM with a Word Error Rate of 1.1%.