From: Larry Yaeger (lsynewtal_at_beanblossom.in.us)
Date: Thu Aug 25 2005 - 01:23:16 PDT
At 7:17 AM -0700 8/24/05, John Steinbeck wrote:
>Apple has recently posted a job description for a
>"Handwriting Recognition Engineer" to work out of
>Santa Clara Valley, California.
I can save a bit of speculation here... I'm basically the only
Inkwell engineer (having been the Newton's "Print Recognizer" Tech
Lead), and I left Apple to work at Indiana University about a year
ago. I still work at Apple one day/week, and have no intention of
changing that anytime soon, but there's only so much I can accomplish
in that amount of time. They've finally got an official head count
to replace me, for which I'm extremely grateful! About time!
Someone mentioned Inkwell HWR not living up to the Newton's. Hate to
say it, but they're basically one and the same. Same recognition
engine, except for a few minor tweaks, plus a new and improved neural
network, trained mainly to accommodate the need for the Euro symbol,
but allowing me to improve the accuracy slightly in the process. Now
some of the smaller, cheaper tablets don't have as good a data rate
or spatial accuracy as the higher end ones, and there's been some
indication that, as a result, recognition accuracy may suffer with
them. I'm afraid that part is out of my control, though if enough
people asked Apple nicely, it's possible that things could be
improved somewhat--training a new net with a bunch of data taken from
these cheaper, lower-data-rate tablets might improve things a bit.
(It helps to have data from the specific device being used for input.)
Someone mentioned Inkwell only works well in English. It actually
should perform comparably in French and German, just as the Newton
did, and all the testing I've done suggests this is the case, though
I'm not a native French or German speaker, so it's possible I'm not
testing something in particular that would cause problems for native
users. If you have specific misrecognitions that are troublesome,
email me, and I'll see if there's something that can be done... Maybe
gather some data from you showing the problem and look for a fix
and/or add your data to the next net training (though I don't know
when that will be). We've never had time, personnel, or budget to
gather data in other Roman-language countries, but that's all that's
missing, for them. (We used the existing French and German data,
gathered for the Newton, plus a tiny bit of new data for the Euro
symbol, to train the new French and German nets.) Extending Inkwell
to Kanji or the like would be terrific, but very difficult, due to
the dramatically different form of the text, though I've long thought
that substituting radicals for characters and whole
pictographs/ideographs for words might work fairly well.
True handwriting recognition will probably never get much priority on
the Mac until there's a Tablet Mac, but ink gestures are actually
pretty hot right now. The Motion app started it
<http://www.apple.com/motion/>, and other apps may be interested in
the technology. Inkwell supports ink gestures and performs all the
gesture recognition for these apps.
- larryy
<http://pobox.com/~larryy/>
P.S. I sincerely wish there was a Tablet Mac *and* an Apple PDA
myself. C'est la vie.
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