Keyboard typing and user experience improvements

  • Article

4/14/2014

As you type, your Windows Embedded 8.1 Handheld device can suggest words and corrections based on the device’s dictionary. Over time, your device automatically adapts to suggest the words you’ve previously typed, such as people's names. These words are only stored on your device. Your device can also make suggestions based on portions of your recent message threads. For most languages, you can choose to disable these suggestions. However, for certain languages (Chinese and Japanese, for example), suggestions cannot be disabled.

You can help Microsoft improve typing on Windows devices and other Microsoft products and services by participating in the Keyboard Touch Information feedback feature.

When you participate, keyboard touch information used by your handheld device to recognize your intended characters (called touchpoints) will be sent to Microsoft whenever you use the software-based or hardware keyboard on the device, along with any characters you typed, words you selected from suggestions, and automatic corrections. Because knowing what kinds of words people type on their devices improves the ability of the keyboard to correctly interpret touchpoints, the recognized text will also be sent.

To help protect your privacy, we do not collect keyboard touch information when the device displays a login screen or password field. We also take measures designed to prevent the collection of email addresses and numeric sequences, such as device numbers or credit card numbers. The keyboard information is sent with a random ID that does not identify you or your device, and then is aggregated with text from many users and transformed into counts of character and word sequences for analysis.

To disable typing suggestions for languages that allow it

  1. Go to Settings > Keyboard.
  2. In the list of enabled languages underneath Add keyboards, tap the language you want to edit.
  3. Clear the check boxes for the settings you want to disable.

To delete words that have been added to your handheld device

  1. Go to Settings > Keyboard.
  2. Tap Advanced.
  3. Tap Reset suggestions.

To change the Keyboard feedback setting at any time

  1. Go to Settings > Keyboard.
  2. Tap Advanced.
  3. Tap the Improve suggestions check box.