The Problem
Compared to other languages, in Italian the relationship between pronunciation and writing can be described by few, simple rules. One exception where most errors occur is related to the proper placing of accent and apostrophe signs in written text. Most Italian writers know that a word has "something" at a certain position, but they are not always sure whether that would be a grave accent, an acute accent, or an apostrophe. Quite often, that "something" turns out to be... "nothing".
Generic spell checkers and input systems do not provide an optimal solution to the problem because they do not build on all the available information. The average user generally knows something important, i.e. that there is a stress, but the knowledge is incomplete, i.e. the exact accent or apostrophe is not known. This (often partial) user-provided information could be helpful, if properly processed, but it is ignored by traditional systems, so that often wrong accents are added or omitted, changing the meaning of sentences. This can be made worse by relying on an inappropriate corpus. Furthermore, many systems do not fully appreciate the importance of the apostrophe character, which in Italian may or may not be part of a word, and is often confused with an accent.
More proficient writers are faced with a dual challenge: not only are some accents difficult to memorize, but traditional computer keyboards don't have all the required letters. For some reason German, French, Spanish and other PC keyboards have all the expected keys to write the prevailing local language, but this isn't the case in Italy, where for example it takes an Alt+number combination to write the capital letter "È" (which is common not only in uppercase titles, but also at the beginning of sentences).
As keyboards get smaller, for example on mobile devices and screens, choices have to be made about which keys to "sacrifice". Removing a key may mean that it takes two keypresses (or a longer press) to generate a character. For example, on some mobile phone keyboards a single press is sufficient to generate a "smiley" character, while it takes a key combination (or a longer hold) to output an apostrophe. Yet even in English writing (and even more so in Italian) the apostrophe character has a higher frequency than the letters X, J, Q and Z...
Regardless of the available keyboard real estate, our text input system always feels "natural" and satisfies the needs of both basic and expert writers.