双语：智能手机输入法的未来

　　In the future, your smartphone won"t auto-correct your errors. It will correct them before they're even made.

　　It will know you really meant to hit the 'K' key on your screen when you hit the 'L' key. Maybe even one day, there won't be a traditional keyboard at all, if some entrepreneurs have their way.

　　While Google Inc. and Apple Inc. go after ways to make it easier to talk to your phone, a new fleet of scientists, startups and app developers are still attacking the problem of typing and input─perfecting how to understand what you want to type rather than what you literally typed.

　　Google lets developers build heavily customized keyboards for smartphones running its Android mobile operating system. That has opened the floodgates for startups like SwiftKey, which builds a predictive Android keyboard that tries to anticipate what a user is trying to type, and Snapkeys, a futuristic-style keyboard that consists of only four keys, to remake the keyboard on Android smartphones.

　　Gesture-based typing and predictive typing has been around for some time─SwiftKey was founded in 2008, for example. But the technology behind it has become so sophisticated that it is now becoming a selling point as smartphone makers take on Apple's iPhone.

　　Case in point, Samsung Electronics Co.will include SwiftKey's predictive technology in the new Samsung Galaxy S 4, which will be unveiled at an event in New York on Thursday, according to a person familiar with the matter.

　　'In the Android space where you have a lot of competition, a little thing like [predictive typing] can make a huge difference,' said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group.

　　This is more than a scientific question─it is a business one, too. Smartphone manufacturers want to reduce the time, or 'friction' needed to input data, as a way of freeing up users to do more browsing, buying, and watching.

　　Mr. Enderle said the use of the standard Qwerty keyboard on the iPhone made such an approach the industry standard. But that won't last long, he said.

　　New-wave keyboards work to 'infer' what the user is trying to type. They use evidence collected about the user, like typing history on social networks, where they are on the Web, or what terms are trending on the Web to determine what word to select next.

　　SwiftKey takes that one step further. 'The way we do this is essentially by modeling the surface of the keyboard as a series of probability distributions,' said Ben Medlock, chief technology officer at TouchType Ltd., the U.K. company behind SwiftKey. In other words, it knows where on a screen you are most likely to tap when pressing a certain key. Eventually, it will recognize that you mean to hit a 'W,' not a 'Q.'

　　SwiftKey is consistently among the top paid applications in the Android ecosystem and has been downloaded more than 15 million times. SwiftKey also licenses its technology to serve as the back-end processing for keyboards, such as the new BlackBerry Z10.

　　Natural language processing─the technology that powers SwiftKey─goes beyond just typing and has applications in other areas, like search. Facebook Inc.'s new search engine Graph Search uses it to understand what, exactly, people are seeking. Facebook also employs linguists that are constantly checking what users are searching for, and making sure Graph Search can account for those results.

　　'If you think about it, a keyword approach is going to miss a lot of subtleties─if you just type in 'photos, Katherine,' you might mean photos of Katherine, photos by Katherine, or photos Katherine is tagged in,' said Amy Campbell, a linguist at Facebook. 'There are a lot of ways to type that both in keywords and language, and it is important for us to deliver results that match their intent.'

　　Snapkeys, an Israeli-based startup, takes things further by wiping out the traditional keyboard altogether. The experience is more akin to texting on an older cellphone, in which multiple letters were assigned to a single key.

　　Instead, the keyboard consists of four 'keys' that represent three commonly-used letters each, and doesn't show letters that aren't often used. The idea is that small screens on devices like smartphones were never meant to have a full keyboard, so users should be able to see more of the screen when typing and interacting.

　　'Today our interaction on small devices are limited to a keyboard and a text box─nothing else beyond that,' said Benjamin Ghassabian, CEO and founder of SnapKeys Ltd. 'When you are interacting with someone, you don't see anything else─no images, no videos, no games, nothing is there. We are going to change that.'

　　Only letters that are used more than 80% of the time are shown, and the rest of the keys are hidden to keep the user experience crisp, Mr. Ghassabian said. (The Z key is the least-frequently used, followed closely by the X key.) He says the system is up to three times faster than a traditional keyboard.

　　Google also has its own stylized predictive keyboard, which it introduced in a recent version of Android, called Gesture Typing. Users glide their finger over letters to build words, and the keyboard can anticipate what's next.

　　It still remains to be seen whether Apple will respond to the demand for next-generation keyboards. Unlike Google, it hasn't opened up its typing interface for experimentation from outside programmers. 'We don't believe this would be the best customer experience,' said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris.

　　Added Dr. Medlock: 'I think at the time, even the guys at Google didn't realize what an advantage it was going to be to have this differentiable input experience. Maybe if Apple could go back, given what we know now, they would do it differently.'

　　未来，智能手机不是在你出错后自动纠错，而是能在你还没犯错时就帮你更正错误。

　　当你敲击“L”键时，它会知道你其实是想敲击“K”键。如果一些创业者能获得成功，或许有一天，传统键盘将会彻底消失。

　　当谷歌(Google Inc.)、苹果公司(Apple Inc.)正设法简化手机语音输入的同时，也有另一群科学家、初创公司和应用程序开发者仍在努力解决打字和输入的问题──即精准理解你想要输入什么，而不是实际输入了什么。

　　SwiftKey谷歌允许开发者为其运行安卓(Android)系统的智能手机打造高度个性化的键盘。此举为类似SwiftKey和Snapkeys这样的初创公司能重新打造安卓智能手机键盘打开了闸门。Swiftkey生产一种具有预测功能的安卓键盘，尝试预测用户试图键入的内容；而Snapkeys则制作一种未来主义风格的键盘，仅包含四个按键。

　　基于手势的输入和预测输入已经出现了一段时间──比如SwiftKey就成立于2008年。当智能手机厂商多采用与iPhone手机类似的键盘设计之际，这类输入功能因其背后技术之复杂，正在成为一大新卖点。

　　举例而言，据消息人士透露，三星电子(Samsung Electronics Co.)在其新款三星Galaxy S 4手机中将运用SwiftKey的预测技术。三星公司将于近日在纽约举行活动，发布此款手机。

　　Enderle Group首席分析师罗布 恩德勒(Rob Enderle)称：“在安卓领域你要面临许多竞争，像‘预测输入’这样的小功能也能产生很大的影响。”

　　这不仅是个科学问题，同时也是个商业问题。智能手机生产商想减少输入数据所需要的时间或“摩擦”，让用户有时间浏览更多网页，进行更多网购，观看更多视频。

　　SwiftKey恩德勒说，由于iPhone使用了标准Qwerty键盘，而使该键盘成为行业标准。但这种状况不会持续很久。

　　一批新型键盘设法“推测”用户试图键入的内容。它们运用所收集的用户相关证据，比如社交网络输入历史，网页浏览习惯或网络热词，来确定用户接下来要选择的词。

　　SwiftKey在这方面更向前迈进了一步。开发SwiftKey的英国公司TouchType Ltd.的首席技术长本 梅德洛克(Ben Medlock)称：“我们的做法从本质上来说，是为键盘界面建起一系列概率分布模型。”换句话说，它知道你在按某个键时其实最可能是想触及屏幕的另一个什么位置。最终，它会识别出你想按的是“W”，而不是“Q”。

　　在安卓生态系统付费应用程序中，SwiftKey一直高居排行榜前列，下载次数超过1,500万次。SwiftKey还将此项技术授权给其他公司，作为其键盘的后端处理系统，比如新款黑莓(BlackBerry) Z10的手机键盘即采用了该技术。

　　SwiftKey所采用的自然语言处理技术，其应用范围不仅限于输入，还可应用于搜索等其他领域。Facebook Inc.的新搜索引擎“社交图谱搜索”(Graph Search)运用这种技术来理解人们究竟在寻找什么。Facebook还聘请语言学家不断考察用户的搜索内容，确保“社交图谱搜索”能提供正确的搜索结果。

　　Facebook的语言学家艾米 坎贝尔(Amy Campbell)称：“想一想你就会知道，仅以关键词方式搜索会忽略许多细微之处──如果仅仅键入‘照片，凯瑟琳(Katherine)’，你可能是指凯瑟琳的照片，凯瑟琳拍摄的照片，或者标注凯瑟琳的照片。无论是用关键词还是用自然语言都有很多种输入方式，对我们来说重要的是，能提供与用户真正意图相符的搜索结果。”

　　总部位于以色列的初创公司Snapkeys走得更远，该公司完全摒弃了传统键盘。其键盘用起来更像是在老式手机上进行文本输入，多个字母共用一个单键。

　　Snapkeys的键盘有四个“键”，每个键各代表三个常用字母，非常用字母不被显示。其设计理念是，智能手机等设备的小屏幕根本不需要配置全键盘，这样能让用户在打字和互动时看到屏幕的更多部分。

　　SnapKeys Ltd首席执行长兼创始人本杰明 加萨比安(Benjamin Ghassabian)称：“如今，我们在小型设备上的互动仅限于一个键盘和一个文本框，除此以外再没其他东西。当你与某人互动时，你看不到任何其他东西──没图像，没视频，没游戏，什么都没有。而我们要改变这种状况。”

　　加萨比安说，为保持用户体验的简洁利落，只有使用频率超过80%的字母才会被显示，其余按键是隐藏的（Z键的使用频率最低，紧接着是X键）。他说，该系统速度最多可比传统键盘快两倍。

　　谷歌也有自己风格化的预测键盘，它在最近推出的安卓版本中引入了名为Gesture Typing的键盘。用户可通过在字母上滑动手指来拼写单词，而键盘能预测接下来的词。

　　苹果是否会响应对下一代键盘的需求，目前还不得而知。苹果尚未像谷歌那样开放输入界面供外部编程者进行试验。苹果发言人纳塔莉亚 克里斯(Natalie Kerris)称：“我们认为这种键盘无法提供最佳用户体验。”

　　梅德洛克博士补充称：“我想当时就连谷歌的人也未能认识到拥有这种差异化输入体验究竟有多大优势。就我们目前了解的情况看，如果苹果能回到过去，他们也许会设计出完全不同的键盘。”