Keyboard for interacting on small devices

TLDR: In this article, a QWERTY-based cluster keyboard is described, which consists of fourteen alphabet keys arranged such that all the letters in the alphabet are distributed in three rows of keys.

Abstract: A QWERTY-based cluster keyboard is disclosed. In the preferred embodiment, the keyboard comprises fourteen alphabet keys arranged such that all the letters in the alphabet are distributed in three rows of keys and in the standard QWERTY positions. Stochastic language models are used to reduce the error rate for typing on the keyboards. The language models consist of probability estimates of occurrences of n-grams (sequences of n consecutive words), wherein n is preferably 1, 2 or 3. A delay parameter d, which is related to the period of time the system displays the predicted intended word upon entry of a word boundary, is preferably zero to immediately display the primary word choice at a word boundary and provide the user the option to select the secondary candidate if necessary. Two disambiguation keys enable the user to identify which letter is intended as a secondary option to the language model predictions.