RoboType: Realistic Mobile Text Entry Evaluations with Synthetic Users

Mobile text entry research is contingent on user-based evaluations, which are frequently carried out in small-scale lab experiments. Recruitment and execution of experiments are costly in terms of time and effort required. Further, the results are hard to generalise, because of the small number of participants in the experiments. Studies are sometimes replicable, but not reproducible. RoboType is a realistic open-source simulator for mobile text entry, written in Python and based on the consolidation of state-of-the-art understanding of human behaviour during entry tasks. It aims to aid researchers to produce fast and accurate evaluations of mobile text entry ideas with fully reproducible results. It can be used to significantly reduce time required to explore the design space of new prototypes on various user bases, or as a benchmark to compare results with other researchers. This paper presents an early implementation of RoboType and demonstrate its promising potential.