What led to the conceptualisation of Panini Keypad

Panini Keypad Draft for The Sunday Guardian

What led to the conceptualization of Panini Keypad? When asked this question with an expectation of a romantic answer I have had to disappoint with the truth. I arrived at the need of developing the Panini Keypad from completely pragmatic logical deductions. I have been a fairly successful hobby shareware developer when I was in the Army. Developing software applications for engineering students that were popular worldwide, offered over the Internet largely free but also selling for $10, $19 etc. However, these were niche products and however good they were they saw relatively small numbers. When I had to do software for my livelihood I decided that I must develop software for the mobile instead of the PC because the mobile was far more numerous, was in its early stage, and had an entry barrier in being more complex and diverse. I was scouting for what could be an application that could be of utility to the largest numbers of people, of critical enough value that one would be ready to pay for (a small ticket) and the hard work should be defensible through it being distinctly unique, well recognized, patents, development complexity and finally ubiquity. When faced with the fact that India already had some 500 million phone users then, majority of them not knowing English or preferring to write in regional languages, the impending need for it, the idea of developing a way to type in Indian languages on the phone seemed like a great idea. We were to support Indian languages natively and not via transliteration from roman which was already around for a long time and was not the requirement. At first we built some simple designs but our early initiatives were appreciated by peer start ups. This encouraged us to continue putting in more time and efforts and innovating. I was mixing up one idea with another and suddenly we came up with this. An intelligent dynamic keypad based on statistical considerations. The first working prototypes were actually made in English but the extension to Indian languages would be easy. No one can plan an invention; you could only be trying and waiting for serendipity to visit you. When we started getting good results in this direction, the whole team went ahead full throttle. Only after developing it fully, did we find time to become familiar with its numerous advantages and we keep discovering new ones even now. The last discovered one being the benefits of this usability to the brain. In that sense, it is God's (Destiny's) gift to us and our country. I dont think we were that clever, the invention was a gift
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What led to the conceptualisation of Panini Keypad

for a believer.

Why is it named Panini? Panini is to Information Sciences what Euclid is to Geometry. Panini lived 2500 years ago in the Indian subcontinent. I wanted to bring this name back to ordinary Indians at a household level to know more about one of our glorious greats and even more importantly to speculate about what kind of knowledge society flourished in the region then and how are we to regenerate back to it. Since the languages of the subcontinent have mainly evolved from Sanskrit, the ensemble of these products were called the Panini Keypad in honour of the grammarian of Sanskrit.

What is the main idea behind it and when was it launched? The main idea behind it is that one did not have to multitap. One key stood for only one character at a time. Only a few predicted characters were on the screen, only 11 of them at a time. Others could be accessed via a Next List button. One could use the numeric keypad to choose any of them, or choose directly on a touchscreen device. When one chose something, it was typed and the keypad responded with fresh characters conditional to what was typed beforehand. This prediction came from statistical considerations obtained from mining large amounts of contemporary texts of Indian languages through computers and putting the linguistic correlations to work for you. The fact that all the languages of the world, as we have discovered gradually, are indeed so highly correlated has resulted in this direction turning out so highly fecund. Our start up started in Aug 2008. At first we were doing something else, getting our feet in place in terms of gathering developmental competency. By Oct we were building this. By Nov-Dec, we were already filing our patents. And we released our first products in Jan 2009. At first one language, but over whole of 2009, all other Indian languages and then many global languages were developed and offered worldwide. We have just launched our Chinese product (Nov 2011) which has started a similar journey which we believe will turn around just like this in a matter of couple of years. It is a very good technology and separate patents have been filed in China.

3) How does the Panini keypad exactly work? Also, unlike only 26 alphabets as in English which is easier to depict on one screen, how are the many matraas, half words etc and also the alphabets in other regional launguages shown on one screen?
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What led to the conceptualisation of Panini Keypad

The English script has 26 characters and yet on a basic phone the number of keypresses per character is 3 or even 4. Indian languages have between 45 and 70 characters each, so to support any of them through multitap would mean 7 or 9 taps per character. This is unusable and hence has been a failure wherever introduced. Also, India has 9 scripts, each used by hundreds of millions of people, all very essential. Including one is always at the cost of non-inclusion of all the others. Plus there is no space to accommodate many printed characters on the little space on the face of the key. This had to be done in a different way. So in the Panini Keypad, the characters are on the screen. This allows all the languages of India to be supported on the same phone. And the statistical prediction is so good that it drastically reduced the number of keypresses required to type anything. It was like 500% better than the existing solutions in parameters like speed, ease, number of taps etc. Since the characters were dynamically assigned, we also made sure they were placed based on ergonomic considerations. Several other ergonomic variations were also offered. In all we readily demonstrate in industry conferences by typing in any Indian language on a basic phone faster than any member of the audience can type in English on an equivalent phone. It is far advanced than western technologies although the problem was far more complex. The half-words, as you call them are really nothing but consonant conjuncts, also called yuktakshars. The rules for forming them is very simple, just put a Halant( ) between them and the conjunct ligatures will automatically form. This is as per standard Unicode rules which was a correct thing to do. We offer a lot of examples in our products for users how to enter the sequence of characters to form them and then users understand the logic and share that knowledge with others. In general, there are 4 types of characters in all Indian scripts. They are independent vowels (swar varnas), consonants (vyanjan varna), matras (dependent vowels), and chinhas (special symbols). The Yuktakshars are always about consonants only. They can be ligatures of two or three characters, the rendering of those ligatures correctly is the role of the rendering engine on the phone. Some have implemented right, others inadequately and many none at all. But these are simple things to do when the will is there.

4) How many languages can be typed in using the keypad? Also, is there one application that allows to selection of the various languages, or is there a different keypad for different language? The Panini Keypad has been developed and offered in Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam and Punjabi. These have been offered in Java phones, Android devices, iPhone and iPad, Windows and now being developed for Blackberry. The product for each language and platform is different but they are called by the same name.
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What led to the conceptualisation of Panini Keypad

5) At what price is the keypad available on the website and is it one-time download? Let me explain something else here, first. In the long term, the end user is never supposed to pay for this kind of a technology. It is supposed to come with the device. You do not pay for the steering wheel privately after you have bought a car. The device manufacturers are supposed to license this or any other technology and make it available on all their devices. We have gone around to all of them. Each have engaged, finding out more information about it, making up their minds on it, discussed commercials. The royalty would be very reasonable and at par with norms of previous such technologies of western languages which were also licensed similarly. In the interim period, we are making this product available to end users in large numbers, mainly free, as an App because it is possible to do so. Both directly from numerous app stores all over the world and also via operators in what are called VAS services. For example we have a model where one can pay Rs 10 and use it for a month, along with bundle packs of free SMS alongside. Such a thing has been launched in Bangladesh. We would like to make this product available at very low prices, we just want to see very large numbers. Right now the products are offered free to download as a trialware in Java, as a freeware in Android and sold for $3 for iPhones. In India, we have retailed it from our own exhibition stalls all over the country for Rs 149 with very good response. It is always a lifetime license and one can continue using it even after one changes his phone models, so its a very fair lifetime license with free online upgrades.

6) Since its inception, how has the response been? Who are the target consumers and who are the actual users? People love to write using the Panini Keypad. They are sending SMS and emails to their friends in all languages of India from their phones. We love to read and reply to their happy emails and phone calls, supporting them. There are a million people who are familiar with the Panini Keypad and are already using it, teaching it to yet others. We need the support of the media to bring about the explosive growth. Its a new bicycle for typing. So one has to learn how to use it after which it is immensely
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What led to the conceptualisation of Panini Keypad

productive and rewarding for them. One develops that usability. But its a very big country, our company tries its best without being able to afford conventional advertising. The end user is every phone user in our country. Sometimes people think regional languages are only for those who dont know English, but in reality for people of many provinces of India, sending a message in their own language is dearer than English even when they know it. Gradually regional languages will become cool for all the people. For all the self respecting great nations of the world, their own languages have been more important than recent colonial impositions. Take China, Russia, Japan, Korea, many others. When we make calls to some of our users, very often they are people who do not understand Hindi or English and from the manner in which they talk we know it has already reached the bottom of the pyramid in every province of India.

7) What do you have to say about the various opportunities available for the lesserprivileged class of the society owing to the boom in the technology? The boom in digital technology is a global phenomenon. India cannot say that the mobile penetration in India is a unique phenomenon. In terms of percentage penetration, we are a little behind Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and is actually near the bottom of the table. But India is a very populous country, so we have nearly the highest number of users. I think the users are in for a good time. Manufacturers from all over the world should crowd here with their best offerings in lowered affordable prices because it happens to be a very large and hence a very profitable market. The Indian user should get to pick and reject what he likes and doesnt like. In fact he should already start doing so, beginning with rejecting products that dont support his regional languages. No manufacturer would have been permitted to sell devices in China which does not support Chinese or Thai in Thailand. But in India, the govt and the regulator are blissfully unconcerned about the device area and unready to take any steps, although their entire m-governance plank would have to rely on such an ecosystem of regional language on phones first being in place. India must also use this opportunity to develop its own indigenous hardware and manufacturing boom in electronics, powered by its own consumption sufficiently. It is so critical for our national security.

8) Is Panini only available for Indian languages?

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What led to the conceptualisation of Panini Keypad

The Panini Keypad brand is reserved for languages that have their roots in Sanskrit or more correctly, what are called Brahmic scripts. We have developed so far for the languages of India but we have also developed something for Thai and shall develop for Sinhala, Tibetan and others which should also be called Panini Keypad. In that sense, it unites us. Our suite of products for global languages is called CleverTexting. It is the same technology in essence with a different name. It has been developed and offered for English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, French, Russian, Hebrew, Finnish, Swahili, Korean, Thai mainly covering all linguistic families and illustrating that this can be developed for all of the hundreds of languages of the world, supported on the same phone through software alone. Our Arabic product in fact sees more downloads and purchases from the Middle East and worldwide than any of our Indian language products. For the other languages, our company has no resources to promote them unless we are first successful commercially in India. Our Chinese product which uses quite different innovations specific to the nature of the Chinese challenge and exploiting its uniqueness is called the Cong Ming Da Zi which means CleverTexting/SmartTexting. Both Panini Keypad and CleverTexting are registered Trademarks.

9) What's next in the pipeline?

It would not be wisest to reveal what we are thinking about right now but we love this area of languages, input and ergonomics. We also like more usable and hence more successful device designs. We are inspired a lot by what Mr Steve Jobs could achieve in bringing forth many of his ideas to large scale adoption against the odds.

10) You may like to know more about this space, technology politics, commercials and valuations, awards we have received, what we see in it, etc in which case you may let me know. But that will demand a much bigger story.

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