Texting in Arabic that is written in the Latin alphabet ("sabaHo") is the norm for many across the Arab world. Yet it sometimes can be frustrating when your phone's English or French keyboard autocorrects your texts to something completely bizarre.
Touch, one of Lebanon's mobile service providers, recently launched a new keyboard app that aims to avoid all of that autocorrect nonsense. The app, called Leb Keys, offers a Latin-letter keyboard programmed specifically for Arabic transliteration.
Of course, this means the keyboard includes the numbers two, three, five and seven on the main keyboard.
We caught up with Paola Mounla, associate creative Director at J. Walter Thompson Beirut, one of the people behind the app's development, to ask her a few questions about the new keyboard.
What was the motivation to develop the Leb Keys keyboard?
Lebanese people chat a lot on social media, and they very often do so in Latin Arabic, substituting some uniquely Arabic sounds with number keys – but given most mobile keyboards have letters and numbers on separate panels, to chat in Latin Arabic means switching between the QWERTY keys & number keys, a cumbersome task.
How did the development unfold and how long were you working on this project?
The challenge was to identify the letters, and replace them by numbers, in a way that the design of the keyboard is immediately easy-to-use without too much hassle; something that would take only a few seconds to get used to.
And so, after studying the structure of the Latin Arabic language, we placed the 3 instead of the Q, as most letters that follow the 3 in Latin Arabic are the E and the A. We then decided to place the 3 and the 2 at opposing thumbs, since they are the numbers that are used the most. The 7 was then placed instead of the C, because it is used in Latin Arabic almost as often as the C is used in English. The 5, which is the least used, replaced the X.
We then reached out to Lebanon-based app developer FOO for the development of the keyboard. The skeleton and coding of the keyboard app was taken from existing keyboards.
Since Leb Keys was released, what kind of response have you seen? Have a lot of mobile phone users been downloading it and giving good reviews?
Touch made the keyboard available to all users, not only their own community. It takes approximately 20 seconds (10 words) to get used to the Latin Arabic keyboard and then the chatting flows naturally.
As a result, Leb Keys has been the talk of the town since its communication launch in mid-April. With over 50,000 downloads on both Android and Apple, it has made its way up to the #1 slot on the Lebanese Apple Store Charts on the 1st of May, outranking Whatsapp, Viber and Trivia Crack.
Are there plans to further develop the keyboard based on user feedback? What are some adjustments that you anticipate?
Like any app, Leb Keys is a constant work-in-progress project. We can’t reveal any possible developments, but touch is a telecommunications company that embraces every opportunity to improve its products – so, watch this space.