I’ve been looking at digital ink a bit differently lately as a result of asking myself this simple question: when do I really need handwriting recognition? I think part of the failure of digital ink has been the focus on handwriting recognition, which has never been good enough to make people comfortable. The human brain is so much better at reading ink and most (not all, but most) of what we do with text is write it and read it with our eyes. If your colleagues at work got occasional ink emails or IMs would this be a problem? Blog posts or tweets in digital ink form raise some issues when it comes to indexing the content for search, but might not the “best effort” handwriting technology we have today be good enough to make this content pretty indexable? The main thing would be to get that HWR processing out of the user’s face so they didn’t have the unsatisfying and distracting experience of it’s imperfect operation.
The tasks I consider that I can’t reasonably do with pure ink are things like creating spreadsheets and writing code. By and large they’re things I wouldn’t normally do when I’m genuinely mobile. I’d love to see more mobile devices that takes ink seriously as a “first-class citizen” for communication of information rather than something that is bolted on in service to ASCII text, which even in the best case imposes so many unnecessary limitations. Livescribe’s Pulse SmartPen seems to have great potential and it will be interesting to watch it evolve (adding wireless, a good desktop SDK, etc). But I believe that there are millions who are still looking for something like Mike Mace’s InfoPad concept.
I think speech is interesting in a few scenarios, but is ultimately quite unnatural as well. A lot of the excitement over it seems to be from people who aren’t really considering the real-world texture of the mobile use context: there are way too many situations where speaking to your device is awkward, rude, or simply won’t work because of the amount of other voices and sounds around. I’m much more optimistic that a rethinking of digital ink will be the Next Big Thing in mobile input/output.
I'm being a bit glib here in writing off the need for text entry as much as I have. For one thing, every resource available on the web is identified with a text URL and every search request must begin with text. But I have a strong hunch that we will find that incremental or even major improvements in handwriting recognition are not the only or best way to address the text input problem.
I know I can think of some better ways, and I'm surely not alone.
Posted by cervezas at 10:01 AM. Filed under: Pen Computing
