Predictive text can be useful but it has the potential to annoy those people who insist on using a large vocabulary whilst typing into a small device. All too often, the word that appears will not be the one intended and some form of substitution then has to occur (sometimes it involves retyping and hoping that the system will learn the new word).
Today’s invention attempts to supply some of the benefits of predictive text generation with less of the downside.
A text messaging device would generate its best guess about what a user was about to type next. Rather than display this, it would simply change the ease of selecting and typing the next predicted letter(s).
On a conventional keyboard, this might involve raising the key for the next character slightly. On a touchscreen or projected keyboard, the guessed character could be displayed as larger (with its size increase dependent on the confidence level).
An enhancement might be to boost the size of the next 1 to n characters predicted, by an amount which would decrease from future-character 1 to n.
