Swarachakra is a logically ordered keyboard, found to be easy to use for newbies

“జీవితంలో ధనం నష్టపోతే, కొంతకోల్పోయినట్టు, కానీ ప్యక్తిత్వం కోల్పోతే సర్వస్వం పోగొట్టుకున్నట్టే... స్వామి వివేకనంద.” If your device can display the Telugu sentence written in quotes perfectly, then your device supports Telugu and Swarachakra should also work well. If you do not see any text, or if some of the words are incorrect, Swarachakra may not work well.

Swarachakra Telugu (తెలుగు స్వరచక్రం) is a touch-screen keyboard for inputting text in Telugu. (Swarachakra is also available in Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, Punjabi, Bengali, Konkani and Tamil).

Swarachakra uses a logically ordered design based on the structure of Dravidian script. Swarachakra displays the consonants sequenced according to the logical structure of Dravidian script, phonetically grouped and arranged in a grid similar to those found in most school textbooks.

Typing with Swarachakra

In Telugu lipi, we frequently need to type a combination of a consonant (క) and a matra (ఒత్తులు) (ొ) like క + ొ = కొ. When you touch a consonant, a chakra with combination of consonants and 10 frequent matras pops up (క్, కా, కి, కీ, కు, కూ, కె, కే, కొ, కో). The chakra gives a preview of the possible character combinations. To select a combination, you slide the stylus or finger towards it.

Typing conjunct like క్క, క్ష, క్త are particularly hard for most people. Swarachakra makes it easy.

First tap on the first part of the combination and select the vowel (అచ్చు) from the chakra (క + ్ ).

Swarachakra then shows a preview of all possible conjuncts that begin with that consonant (హల్లులు) (క + ్ + త) = క్త; ఙ + ్ + ఞ = ఙ్ఞ etc. If you need to add a matra, select it from the new chakra like earlier (క్క, క్ఖ, క్గ, క్ఘ, క్ఙ...).

The other example could be for building difficult combination of consonants like జ్యోత్స్న has to be typed as (జ్య + ో = జ్యో) + (త్స + ్ + న = త్స్న) = జ్యోత్స్న

Complete vowels (అ, ఆ, ఇ, ఈ, ఉ, ఊ, ఎ, ఏ, ఒ, ఓ) appear in a separate chakra on the bottom left on pressing letter అ. The extra vowels (ఐ, ఔ) will appear upfront in the right bottom of the keypad. Rarely used vowels and matras (ఋ, ౠ, ఌ, ౡ, ౕ, ౖ, ౘ, ౙ, ఽ) will appear pressing the letter ఋ. Numerals and symbols appear on a shift. You could also switch to the QWERTY keypad temporarily to input English characters.

Installing Swarachakra

Install Swarachakra Telugu by clicking the “Install” button above and follow the steps below:

1. Open “Settings” in your device

2. Select the “Language and Input” and choose the option “తెలుగు స్వరచక్రం” (Swarachakra Telugu)

3. Finally, click on the “Default” option in the “Keyboard and Input methods” section, and select తెలుగు స్వరచక్రం (Swarachakra Telugu) as the default keyboard.

NOTE: Swarachakra is designed for Android 4.0 (ICS) and above versions. It does not work right now on older versions because they do not have Unicode support.