Here’s another reason to be excited about using Android devices.

Students at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University are currently developing and testing a new Chinese input system on Android devices. This new input, named Aeviou, is similar to Swype, with the difference being that Aeviou is only for Chinese input.

There are already quite a lot of different Chinese input methods on the market which is natural, considering the keyboard was primarily designed for English language input. However, this is only when traditional keyboard input is used. For the increasing number of mobile devices released, the main method of input for Chinese is still the PinYin method. PinYin input entails having to phonetically spell out each character and then selecting the correct character among the choices. The entire Chinese language is represented by 412 phonetic combinations so it is a long and tedious list. There is also the choice of handwriting Chinese on touchscreen devices but, although it is the most natural Chinese input method, it is also the slowest. There are so many strokes in Chinese characters that it takes a long time to input a character and thereby also increasing the chance for errors.

Aeviou intends to replace traditional PinYin input methods to become the fastest and most convenient input method for mobile devices. It removes all the vowels and the letter “v” (that’s where the name Aeviou comes from), reducing the combinations for Chinese PinYin input. This lets you literally swipe through the letters with ease, just like you would with Swype. Researchers claims that their speed tests show an increase of more than 3x against other input methods.

Now that is real fast. Check out the video below for Aeviou in action and comparison with other input methods:
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