Designing an efficient virtual keyboard for text composition in Bengali

Recent advancement in communication and information technology (ICT) flourishes the computing and handheld devices in urban and rural areas in India. Now people all over the world communicate each other using hand-held digital gadgets like PDA, cell phone etc. in addition to desktop PC and laptop. But, text entry task remains critical in English as well as Indian languages. Moreover, non-availability of standard mechanism in Indian languages makes obstruction in better text composition. Text entry through standard hardware keyboard is not viable in many digital gadgets because of size, mobility restriction etc. As an alternative to hardware keyboard, virtual keyboard based text entry has been advocated with easy to personalize, low cost and user friendliness. This paper proposes an approach to design a virtual keyboard for text entry in Bengali language. The proposed approach can be extended to other Indian languages with a minor modification.