The Gesture Keyboard (GSK)
In India's increasingly affluent society, one of the main stumbling blocks is language.
Many people are put off using computers because of the difficulty of using standard Qwerty-style keyboards with Indic languages, of which there are more than 18.
Hindi has 36 consonants that can be modified to make 1,500 separate syllables. Typing in just one may take two or three key strokes on a keyboard originally designed for the English language.
Pen gestures
Hewlett Packard is hoping to change this with a new keyboard designed to bridge the divide.
The Gesture Keyboard (GSK), developed at the company's Bangalore research laboratories, has just gone on sale in India.
It consists of a pen and a touch-sensitive pad that allows users to select from a grid of consonants and then modify them quickly with a pen stroke. The two combine to form a syllable, significantly speeding-up the process of writing in an Indic script.
"For anyone who knows how to write on paper, it takes just 15 to 20 minutes to learn the gesture keyboard," said Shekhar Borgaonkar, one of the researchers behind the device.
"For all of the Indic languages, this will be the only keyboard needed to enter data into computers," he said.
The keyboard can be used to write Hindi, Marathi and Kannada, spoken by more than 400 million people. It costs just over £30 ($53) and can be used by any machine running Windows or Linux.
If the GSK takes off it could replace standard keyboards across Asia and give people access to computing technology increasingly needed to participate in the modern world.
This is part of this story on the BBC.
Many people are put off using computers because of the difficulty of using standard Qwerty-style keyboards with Indic languages, of which there are more than 18.
Hindi has 36 consonants that can be modified to make 1,500 separate syllables. Typing in just one may take two or three key strokes on a keyboard originally designed for the English language.
Pen gestures
Hewlett Packard is hoping to change this with a new keyboard designed to bridge the divide.
The Gesture Keyboard (GSK), developed at the company's Bangalore research laboratories, has just gone on sale in India.
It consists of a pen and a touch-sensitive pad that allows users to select from a grid of consonants and then modify them quickly with a pen stroke. The two combine to form a syllable, significantly speeding-up the process of writing in an Indic script.
"For anyone who knows how to write on paper, it takes just 15 to 20 minutes to learn the gesture keyboard," said Shekhar Borgaonkar, one of the researchers behind the device.
"For all of the Indic languages, this will be the only keyboard needed to enter data into computers," he said.
The keyboard can be used to write Hindi, Marathi and Kannada, spoken by more than 400 million people. It costs just over £30 ($53) and can be used by any machine running Windows or Linux.
If the GSK takes off it could replace standard keyboards across Asia and give people access to computing technology increasingly needed to participate in the modern world.
This is part of this story on the BBC.