Handwriting Recognition: Now What Does that Say?

To be truthful, I haven't thought about handwriting recognition for a while, even though it wasn't that long ago that handwriting recognition was the cat's pajamas of anyone interested in mobile computing. Heck, even at Dr. Dobb's Journal we held our Handwriting Recognition Contest.

Ray Valdes, then a technical editor for DDJ, organized the contest with Ron Avitzur's help. You can find out more about Ron's algorithms and techniques in this article. More recently, handwriting recognition popped up in Regan Coleman article "Symbian Database Components". In a nutshell, Regan's point is that operating systems for a variety of mobile devices to be flexible and accomodating to meet the needs of the design.

Out of blue, a press release from Vision Objects, a vendor of handwriting recognition and text input tools, found its way to me this morning, announcing that its MyScript recognition technology now support of 70 languages. Coincidentally, the company will be demonstrating its technology at the Symbian Smartphone Show 2006 in London next week.

Additionally, the company also announced MyScript Letra, a pack of resources specifically designed for mobile devices. MyScript Letra also recognizes hand-printed and isolated characters in 70 different languages. According to Vision Objects, MyScript Letra can be integrated into small footprint platforms using a touch screen and stylus-based interfaces such as PDAs, electronic tablets, smartphones and gaming devices. It recognizes language-specific sets of characters including upper- and lowercase, accented characters, digits, punctuation marks and even individual and country specific writing styles.

You'd hope that after all this time that handwriting recognition technology would have overcome its biggest hurdle -- doctors writing legible prescriptions. One language or 70. That's still the biggest hurdle.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 02:01 PM  Permalink