Virtual Keyboard For Android

Virtual Keyboard For Android is A Free Keyboard App For Your Needs

It's a computer. A virtual keyboard is a typewriter-style device that uses a set of buttons or keys to simulate mechanical or electronic switches. Following the demise of punch cards and paper tape, teleprinter-style interactivity has become popular. Virtual keyboards have surpassed physical keyboards as the preferred way of computer input.

Characters are usually carved or printed on virtual keyboard keys (buttons), and each press of a key corresponds to a single written symbol.

Some symbols, on the other hand, may necessitate the simultaneous or sequential pressing and holding of numerous keys.

virtual keyboard might provide an alternative input mechanism for users with disabilities who cannot use a conventional keyboard, or for bi- or multi-lingual users who switch frequently between different character sets or alphabets, which may be confusing over time. Although hardware keyboards are available with dual keyboard layouts (e.g. Cyrillic/Latin letters in various national layouts), the on-screen keyboard provides a handy substitute while working at different stations or on laptops

Virtual keyboards can be categorized by the following aspects:

Virtual keyboards with touchscreen keyboard layouts or sensing areas

Optically projected keyboard layouts or similar arrangements of "keys" or sensing areas

Optically detected human hand and finger motions

Online virtual keyboards for multiple languages that don't require OS settings change

Depending on which device the keyboard is used (desktop / mobile / virtual reality / augmented reality)

On the Internet, various JavaScript virtual keyboards have been created, allowing users to type their own languages on foreign keyboards, particularly in Internet cafes. Multitouch screens allow the possibility to create virtual chorded keyboards for tablet computers, touchscreens, touchpads and wired gloves.

Virtual keyboards are commonly used as an on-screen input method in devices with no physical keyboard, where there is no room for one, such as a pocket computer, personal digital assistant (PDA), tablet computer or touchscreen-equipped mobile phone. Text is commonly inputted either by tapping a virtual keyboard or finger-tracing.

Text entry performance

Next to the classic virtual keyboard implementation Android and custom keyboards, such as SwiftKey for example, are providing different features to improve the usability and the efficiency of their keyboards.

Autocorrection and spelling checker

The Android platform offers a spelling checker framework that offers the possibility to implement and access spell checking in the application itself. The framework is one of the Text Service APIs offered by the Android platform. Based on provided text, the session object returns spelling suggestions generated by the spelling checker.

iOS is using the class UITextChecker, an object used to check a string (usually the text of a document) for misspelled words, commonly known as Apple's autocorrection. UITextChecker spell-checks are using a lexicon for a given language. It can be told to ignore specific words when spell-checking a particular document and it can learn new words, which adds those words to the lexicon.

Word suggestions

Diverse scientific papers at the beginning of the 2000s showed even before the invention of smart phones, that predicting words, based on what the user is typing, is very helpful to increase the typing speed. At the beginning of development of this keyboard feature, prediction was mainly based on static dictionaries. Google implemented the predicting method in 2013 in Android 4.4. This development was mainly driven by third party keyboard providers, such as SwiftKey and Swype. Both provide powerful word search engine with corresponding databases. In 2014 Apple presented iOS 8 which includes a new predictive typing feature called QuickType, which displays word predictions above the keyboard as the user types.