  Touch surfaces are widely utilized for smartphones, tablet PCs, and laptops
(touchpad), and single and double taps are the most basic and common operations
on them. The detection of single or double taps causes the single-tap latency
problem, which creates a bottleneck in terms of the sensitivity of touch
inputs. To reduce the single-tap latency, we propose a novel
machine-learning-based tap prediction method called PredicTaps. Our method
predicts whether a detected tap is a single tap or the first contact of a
double tap without having to wait for the hundreds of milliseconds
conventionally required. We present three evaluations and one user evaluation
that demonstrate its broad applicability and usability for various tap
situations on two form factors (touchpad and smartphone). The results showed
PredicTaps reduces the single-tap latency from 150-500 ms to 12 ms on laptops
and to 17.6 ms on smartphones without reducing usability.
