[NTLK] Jobs, Newton, Siri, etc

[Jim Witte]

On Oct 12, 2011, at 12:00 PM, Forrest Buffenmyer wrote:

> I'm not sure that Siri was designed for those times--at least, I certainly hope not--but I'm sure there will be those that will use it no matter what the background is. I do have high hopes that it will be the start of a better way to communicate with our devices

	But, presumably the Inkwell framework is either already buried somewhere in the iOS, or could be quite easily recompiled for ARM by Apple..  So presumably a handwritten-drive Assist function could be added to iPad right now without much trouble at all.  I’m assuming Inkwell still isn’t quite up to Apple’s standards yet for that.  I’m guessing they’d probably want at least "3 nines” reliability, and the "interface model” for a handwriting versus voice interface would probably have to be different even from the Newton.  After people have used Siri, they’re not going to want to take even the 6 or 10 seconds it takes to Rosetta-readably-scrawl “Meet with George on Friday at 1" when it only takes about 3 seconds and a lot less effort to say it.

	But the possibility is there, and I’m sure it’ll get used at some point.  I’m very surprised that Inkwell hasn’t been integrated already, although Apple may be “putting the finishing touches” on the technology to improve the accuracy even more, and perhaps get it working with cursive.  Larry Yaeger said that his team was about 80-90% of the way to getting Rosetta working with connected script when Newton was axed - keeping in mind the 80-20 rule about programming :)  I wonder, if I wrote something that would hack the Inkwell framework into iPad and made an interface to it, assuming the framework is already there or could be dynamically recompiled for ARM by reading the Mac framework code..  in a jailbroken app of course - what would Apple do?

Jim