Vernacular and Voice Driven Crosswords

I worked on supporting crosswords in Indian vernacular languages in PuzzleMe. I had special interest in this project as my mother tongue is Kannada and I wanted to do my bit to preserve local languages and culture in whatever small way possible.

There were three main challenges that needed to be addresses—

1. Unlike Latin-based languages, Indian vernacular languages have compound letters. So essentially every box in the grid contains more than ‘one letter’, usually referred to as ‘rebus’ and the puzzle is always in rebus mode.

   As a result, we cannot move the focused box automatically as we cannot be sure if the letters typed in a box are complete.

2. Inputting answers into the grid in Indian vernacular languages is complicated because typing is cumbersome. Moreover, since the focused box cannot be moved automatically, users would have to tap too many times to fill the grid.

3. The compound letters often require more horizontal and/or vertical space. So we needed to automatically resize the compound characters whenever needed, in both the grid and the on-screen keyboard.

I developed vernacular on-screen keyboards like we have for Latin-based languages that is shown on desktop as well in this case. But to make it really for users to solve the puzzles, I also integrated speech recognition allowing users to use voice to enter the answers. We launched, what we think is, the first voice driven crosswords in the world!