Hummer: Text Entry by Gaze and Hum

Abstract

Text entry by gaze is a useful means of hands-free interaction that is applicable in settings where dictation suffers from poor voice recognition or where spoken words and sentences jeopardize privacy or confidentiality. However, text entry by gaze still shows inferior performance and it quickly exhausts its users. We introduce text entry by gaze and hum as a novel hands-free text entry. We review related literature to converge to word-level text entry by analysis of gaze paths that are temporally constrained by humming. We develop and evaluate two design choices: “HumHum” and “Hummer.” The first method requires short hums to indicate the start and end of a word. The second method interprets one continuous humming as an indication of the start and end of a word. In an experiment with 12 participants, Hummer achieved a commendable text entry rate of 20.8 words per minute and outperformed HumHum and the gaze-only method EyeSwipe in both quantitative and qualitative measures.