Re: [NTLK] Inkwell and cursive HWR in OS X

At 11:59 AM -0700 5/7/08, Martin Joseph wrote:
>People at the conference who know far more then me about handwriting 
>recognizers quietly stated that it was very poor compared to modern
>recognizers available on other platforms.

FWIW, I would characterize it slightly differently and in a bit more detail: Based on limited personal testing, I think Tablet PC recognition is on a par with Inkwell for pure print recognition. But Tablet PCs handle connected characters substantially better than Inkwell. And they handle cursive surprisingly well, which Inkwell doesn't handle at all.

I don't think anyone else is in the same league with Microsoft's Tablet PC and Apple's Inkwell, for Latin alphabets. Although it's been a while since I paid close attention to this now.

Tablet PC HWR is a fusion of the improved Paragraph recognition technology of Newton 2.x (the cursive recognizer) and an in-house, Microsoft-developed recognizer. And they reportedly combined them in a very sensible, clever fashion.

- larryy

P.S. Though the HWR technology itself did improve slightly from Newton to Inkwell, the bulk of the engineering time spent on that transition was used for integrating Mondello first into OS 9 (which was then abandoned when Apple Marketing declared "no new features on OS 9") and then into OS X. It's not that a lot of effort wasn't put into the transition, just that it was mostly applied to things other than the actual recognition technology. Then with the OS revving annually, the PowerPC to Intel change, display resolution issues, and security issues, all available engineering resources were spent on running as fast as possible just to stay in the same place. Which is one of the key reasons I left. Well, that and an obvious disinterest, at the highest levels, in a Tablet Mac or pen-based PDA, and, most importantly, an opportunity to pursue the research I was most interested in elsewhere.

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Received on Wed May 7 15:52:39 2008