A Design and Development of Thai Stenotype Keyboard Layout on Android

Stenotype is a chorded keyboard that use in many countries for the situation that demand some tool to type text from the speech in real time. Not only can the stenotype help in documenting the reports in court, but it also aids people with hearing disabilities in class or meeting by allowing them to read the text once the transcriber transcribing the text from live speech [1]. The average speed a transcriber can type is 225 words per second. However, the only available stenotype is in English. This paper, henceforth, presents a prototype of a Thai Stenotype application. We employed the concept of the English stenotype usability and Thai phoneme grammar in the development of our prototype.

Moreover, the statistics of Thai word frequency were used for pasting a phoneme on a given key and testing the efficacy of the keyboard layout by human and simulation program. It was found that the test result from human testing and the simulation program were discrepant. However, the accuracy of this application is ninety percent and this keyboard layout could decrease the number of strokes per word from 4.701 strokes per word to 1.546 strokes per word. We consider the prototype as a first step and strive at improving its efficiency to make it usable in real-world applications.