Kiiboodoo Project - Intro
2019-01-10
My latest project, Kiiboodoo, is coming along great and I’m excited to see what it becomes. My original goal with Kiiboodoo was a simple, lightweight Japanese keyboard that could be used in the browser. Recently, I thought of adding additional features such as a detailed kanji search function. Now my goal is to build a piece of software that acts as a keyboard and a dictionary for the Japanese language. In the process of making this project I thought about my experiences texting in Japanese and what made those experiences fun. A technology that made texting Japanese on a nine-key flip phone somewhat easy was text prediction. One of my long-term goals for this project is to add some sort of text prediction functionality. This will allow users to achieve more productivity with Kiiboodoo. For those who aren’t familiar with Japanese, there are three alphabets. Hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana and katakana are relatively straight forward alphabets each containing around 50 symbols. Each symbol represents a different sound in the Japanese language. Hiragana and katakana alone are not enough for writing idiomatic Japanese.. Kanji makes it so that words with the same sound but different meanings (homophones) can be distinguished from each other in writing without confusion. One popular example involves the words, 暑い, 熱い, and 厚い. These three words would be written as あつい if kanji didn’t exist in the Japanese writing system, and that would make reading Japanese a chore. There would be no way to distinguish between the three words unless you did a bit of detective work and looked into the context the word was being used in. In total there are around 4,000 Chinese characters used in Japanese writing. To be able to read the average Japanese newspaper one needs to know at least 2,000 kanji. My biggest hurdle with this project will be dealing with the vast amount kanji. If the user types “あ” what kanji should Kiiboodoo suggest as a replacement? This is a problem I am going to have to solve if I’m going to build the Japanese keyboard that I want. Working on Kiiboodoo has me thinking a lot about how humans interact with computers, and what the future of human-computer interaction may look like.