Skip to content
Writing Systems Technical Resources

Other Input Methods

Although a keyboard (either a physical keyboard or a touch screen keyboard) is likely the most common means of data input, other possibilities exist. Among these are:

  • Character pickers
  • USV entry
  • Voice recognition
  • Handwriting recognition
  • Optical character recognition

Character pickers

Character pickers (either hosted on a website or on the user’s device) present an array of characters and allow the user to select the desired ones. This is generally a slower method for data input than a keyboard, but may be useful for entering small amounts of text. See the “Web-based pickers” and “Character Pickers” sections of this Keyboard Systems Overview article for further details.

USV entry

The computer operating system or a specific software application may offer the possibility of entering a character by typing its Unicode Scalar Value (USV), that is the four-, five-, or six-digit hexadecimal value introduced by “U+”. This is a slow input method, only suitable for entering occasional characters. See the “USV entry methods” section of this Keyboard Systems Overview article for additional discussion.

Voice recognition

With voice recognition (also known as speech-to-text), a person speaks into the microphone of a computer or phone. The device then analyzes the recorded sounds and matches them to information about a particular language, attempting to produce the corresponding text. Because this method may require large amounts of written text and corresponding recordings, it may not be feasible for a language that is relatively new in the digital space. Text produced in this manner needs to be verified for accuracy.

See Speech recognition for more details.

Handwriting recognition

With hand writing recognition, a person draws characters, often with a stylus on a touch-sensitive screen, and the device (phone, tablet or computer) translates these drawings into characters.

See Handwriting recognition for more details.

Optical character recognition

Optical character recognition (or OCR) involves taking a visual copy of text (usually printed text, but possibly handwritten text) and attempting to detect what characters are there. Text produced in this manner needs to be verified for accuracy.

See Optical character recognition for more details.