3-Key-Input: Exploring the Theoretical Minimum Keys for Text Entry
How far can we reduce the number of physical keys if we endow an ambiguous keyboard with modern language models? Fewer keys increase hardware design freedom in constrained settings such as assistive devices and mobile form factors. This paper systematically evaluates text entry systems using 2-5 physical keys combined with language-model-based disambiguation. On a 300-sentence English corpus (100 sentences each for Business / Conversational / Technical), we compare key counts (2-5), letter-to-key mappings (layout-based / frequency-based / intentionally worst-case), and decoders (Trie-only, GPT-2 beam search, GPT-4o selection). We find that 3 keys + GPT-4o achieves character error rate (CE...
| Authors | Naoki Kimura |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.HC |
| Published | 10 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 June 2026 |
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