Pen Computing Issue
#6Pen Computing Issue
#6Competition in the as of yet small universe of handwriting recognition
is fierce. More than half a dozen notable companies are pursuing the holy
grail of handwriting recognition due to the potentially huge payoff should
recognition finally live up to its promise. That promise, initially, was
to bring the pen and paper metaphor into the computer age by letting people
write onto a computer slate with an electronic pen. The written text would
then be swiftly translated into ASCII text, thus obsoleting the static paperpad
just as wordprocessors obsoleted the typewriter. Well, handwriting recognition
turned out to be a thornier problem than anticipated and many of the original
efforts ended in disappointment. Fortunately, the people who work in this
field are not only brilliant, they are also tenacious and won't give up
easily, and the industry, in general, hasn't stood still. What's happening
is that three trends are converging to breathe new life into handwriting
recognition, and perhaps more. These trends are: 1) the appearance of much
more powerful pen hardware that can more handle the processing requirement
of recognizers, 2) a general (and often substantial) improvement in recognition
technology, and 3) a move away from across-the-board recognition towards
using recognition for more specialized applications. One of these tenacious
companies that's been advancing the state of the art in handwriting recognition
is aptly named Advance Recognition Technologies (ART) which has offices
in Tel Aviv, Israel and Menlo Park, California. When I was first invited
to a demo by ART's sales and marketing veep Sol Gradman and R&D chief
Eran Aharonson at last year's PCC/CES show in Chicago, I didn't know what
to expect. When we left two hours later, both Tim Schmidt, one of the foremost
handwriting recognition industry followers, and I were more than just impressed
with ART's smARTwriter. The ART folks had told us their philosophy: a recognizer
must be good enough so that users can walk up to it and start using it right
away. yet, it should also improve with use. ART had looked at neural nets
and other traditional approaches, and deemed them too slow or otherwise
inappropriate. Instead, they came up with a process called dynamic feature
elicitation, a technology derived from advanced signal processing algorithms
originally developed for electronic military applications. ART also felt
that in order to be successful, a recognizer must be completely unobtrusive,
allowing the user to write without restrictions, boxes, lines, or input
windows. The recognizer also had to be fast, so that it could run on mobile
computers with lower power processors. Amazingly, smARTwriter fulfills all
of these goals. You can start using the recognizer right away without any
training and it will do quite well. Take the five to ten minute training
session and recognition will soar. The recognition engine is small and very
fast, actually small enough to fit into ROM. And since smARTwriter is not
dictionary-based, it recognizes foreign letters and words as easily as English.
It is basically a printed letter recognizer, though it is theoretically
possible to teach it a cursive alphabet. smARTwriter comes with a demo program
that shows off the recognizers capabilities. For example, writing can be
recognized in visual (as written), logical (location-independent), and boxed
mode. Logical allows for very rapid data entry in a small window, similar
to Graffiti. Filtering increases recognition accuracy by only considering
certain classes of symbols, such as numerals or caps. Error correction is
quick and painless with a quick click on a pop-up window that provides the
next most likely possibilities and access to a keyboard. Confidence level
settings between 0 and 100 allow fine-tuning for particular applications.
It's easy to see how smARTwriter can be optimized for all sorts of different
recognition applications. And the company keeps improving the product. At
deadline we were able to take the brandnew 2.0 version for a test drive.
It offers several improvements over an an already impressive product. For
example, there is a small floating palette that lets you communicate with
smARTwriter in any Windows application and provides instant access to keyboard,
user libraries, on-the-fly training, and recognizer fine-tuning. The bottomline
is that ART's technology ranks right up there and anyone searching for the
state of the art in recognition should look at it. Version 2.0 will also
include smARType, a character module recognizer that accepts one-stroke
pre-defined or user-defined characters. We didn't see this, but ART's speedy
recognition engine and already available logical mode data entry option
suggest that ART can do it, and do it well.
DOS, Windows, and GEOS versions of smARTwriter are currently available,
and Windows 95 and Magic Cap versions are under development.
ART: 9574 Topanga Canyon Blvd. Chatsworth CA 91311 tel 818-678-3999