#002 Aside - History of Chinese Input Methods
Giant Chinese Keyboard?
Computers were first introduced to China around the 1970-1980s. The first problem was - how do you input Chinese characters?
Experts scratched their heads and there were basically two schools of thought:
Replace Chinese characters with Pinyin (a process known as Romanization).
Build a giant characters-based keyboard.
Both were not very feasible.
Until 1983, a programmer named Wang Yongmin after spending 5 years developed a shape-based input method called Wubi ("Five strokes"). It works by piecing together brush strokes or patterns, and technically you can enter any character within 5 keystrokes.
The problem is it requires rote memorization. Many Chinese kids born in the 80s & 90s would remember getting cane strokes by parents or teachers when they failed to remember the Wubi Patterns Table. 😢
Smart ABC was created by a Peking University professor, Zhu Shoutao, in 1995 and it partnered with Microsoft so it came pre-installed with the Windows OS. It's a phonetic-based input method, so as long as you're literate / know Pinyin, you're fine - no extra memorization required.
It is a slower system, however, because a) it generally takes more keystrokes to enter the same character as compared to Wubi and b) you have to select the desired character from a list of home-phonetic possibilities.
To mitigate a), Smart ABC incorporated the Shuangping (“Double-spell”) method, which maps common combinatory consonants (e.g. "Ch”, “Sh”) and vowels (e.g. “iang”, “uan”) on the keyboard and many characters can be entered with just two keystrokes combining the consonant and the vowel. (Imagine you can enter “Con”, “tion”, “ment" with one keystroke for English).
Also, as a phonetic-based system, it needs a words/phrases database, but as an on-premise software, its database is very limited.
Sogou came in 2006 (when cloud computing came around) and it changed the game for phonetic-based input methods.
Its innovations include:
The use of a search engine to solve the words/phrases database problem.
Dynamic ranking - more used words will come higher in the list of words for selection
Context-based suggestion for next words
Sogou is a $3B business today (NYSE: SOGO. It also has a search engine business.)