Apple looking to put handwriting recognition into the iPhone?
By Ryan Block 
posted Mar 28th 2008 11:52PM
posted Mar 28th 2008 11:52PM
[Via Macrumors]
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how does that work with just your finger? using a stylus just seems so...oldschool from here. maybe its just me
not just you, spend some time and review the iPhone intro, Jobs agree that too.
Unless it's handwriting recognition off a sample.
Wasn't there talk about the next iPhone using it's screen as a scanner?
Considering the inkwell "technology" in os x is plain crap, i wouldn't be getting all hyped up about this
oh no! you said osx is crap! the fanboys will go after you now. and since they're apple fanboys, i assume they have no technological knowledge and will pretend to hack you.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=CCHqMENtKkA
Inkwell sucking ape balls is exactly why they need help.
Don't assume mac users have not tested inkwell. It does suck!
I completely agree with all of you- it does suck.
This is probably more aimed towards a tablet PC or just to improve the OS itself, i can't really see it working well with the current gen. iphone but eh, the future is always a surprise...
i use a wacom tablet almost exactly the same size as my 23" monitor, and i was really looking forward to using Inkwell... but i dropped it in less than a week because it just wasn't useful.
Maybe they'll hire someone who can MAKE it useful. :)
...also, wasabi, do you really need to be so douchey all the time? shill.
I thought all engineers had terrible handwriting
:P
they do, but purposefully. why? cause you can't tell when they fuck up
Well, you should see doctor's handwriting. Since I was a kid, I always had problems reading the doctor's note for my school teacher. I can only guess the first three word goes "Tommy is sick..."
Tom~
They must have some people left from the Newton project..
Egg freckles?
eat up martha?
Bring back Newton and stylist.
Maybe the recognition isn't for user input...
What about writing on a piece of paper, taking a photo of it, and having any recognized text be put into the notes app?
Ready for editing or emailing.
i think you might be talking about OCR
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition
Uh oh... Not another "Eat up Martha" parody all over again...
Hey engadget why dont you stop stalking apple!? Every little patent every little thing you just pounce on it just leave them alone they dont need you breathing down their neck all the t ime OKAY!!?
Yeah! And stop writing about gadgets! Gadgets don't need you breathing down their neck all the time! OKAY!?
Cereal Doucheranios, what do you expect them to write about, the amazing quest that you are on to lose your virginity?
Here's an option: don't read the article if you don't care, but realize that in all probability you aren't a journalist, and Engadget isn't your publication, therefore they could care bugger all about your journalistic opinion.
Nathan,
Better alternative.
Forget about not reading it because I'm sorry when I'm scrolling down the page I'm going to see this pointless shit.
Forget about having specialized RSS feeds for an Engadget Apple free page because I'm not always at a computer where such a setting is cached or whatnot.
Instead why doesn't Weblogs Inc create an Apple site like an Unofficial Apple weblog....oh right they already have.... So the question remains. WFT is with needing to have even the smallest tremor in the Apple force show up on Engadget instead of http://www.tuaw.com ? Pointless and annoying. IMHO and it is an opinion the only shit from Apple that should be showing up here is official new hardware\software announcements. Everything else should stay the fuck on TUAW
Well Jon Douche (I'm going with the feminine hygiene theme today),
Engadget doesn't cater to the vocal minority, which would be you and the guy with the bathtub toy for an avatar up top there. Most of the reasonable, ordinary, prudent people who frequent this site just glance over articles that we don't find interesting. Oh but not you! Not all important John Doe!
You NEED these erroneous posts that you find to be a waste of time so that you can get up on your "I know more about publishing than you, you need to listen to me!" soapbox and rant, rave, bitch and moan, until your positive that all your e-peen flexing has paid off.
Your reason to visit this site is to have something to complain about, be it something you don't find useful or something someone else says, so if I were you I wouldn't press the editors to stop giving you cause to show up.
Engadget is free to do what they damn well please with any news they get, whether grumpy curmudgeons like you like it or not, and if it displeases you then exercise your right not to come to the site at all.
Also, John Doe, just out of curiosity do you ever go into the public library and start yelling and yelling and yelling, and telling the library administrators to get rid of all these stupid, useless books that you don't want to read?
Do you let them know how terrible of an inconvenience it is to someone as important as yourself to have to sift through all this free information just to find that latest fiction release in the young adults section?
I find this analogy to be adequate to what you are suggesting, that information be sequestered from your view at the expense of everyone else who is interested, just so your day can be made a little easier.
Get over yourself.
Y'all just got trolled!
That's a very impressive demo for Vista. Can't Apple's Inkwell be trained over a period of time to improve it's lousy performance? One thing I noticed was that the area you write in Vista was much more confined, which must be a good thing. Whatever, Vista's recognition wins by the huge margin. I hope Inkwell or another technology can be improved upon for Apple to compete in character recognition.
iPhone Newton, anyone?
Besides... no stylus + handwriting recognition = fail
Tablets.
Exactly. Handwriting recognition for the iPhone would be stupid.
Plus if it was for the iPhone, you'd have to use those finger styli or a regular stylus.
JA
Tablets- Definately. This is one increasingly popular market that apple is not at all into that Microsoft is the only player in. The use of LED backlights as well as new thinner wacom screens makes it very possible for tablets to start fitting into the Apple ideology of thin and simple. Despite being a HUGE apple hater- An apple tablet might be just the thing to change my opinion.
Reminds me of that Simpsons episode. Where the thugs write 'Beat up Martin' on the Apple Newton and the Newton translates it as 'Eat up Martha'
Big fat deal...My HP iPaq has fantastic handwriting recognition, better than anything I have used. In fact, I have been using great handwriting recognition with all of the old MS Windows Mobile and Pocket PC technologies for at least ten years. All of the sudden we hear from Apple introducing it on the iPhone...heck, I thought the iPhone always had it. Are you trying to tell me that for $500 they could not put handwriting recognition on the technology. What the heck do you receive for $500 that I cannot live without anyway? Perhaps they should start with a removable battery.
This is as bad as telling me that Al Gore invented the Internet.
There's no such thing as an HP iMac.
Yes it is funny that Windows Mobile has had 4 input methods for many years, which all work very well, yet the brand new iPhone has just one....
but apart from my apple bashing i think iPhones would be killer with a handwriting recognition engine.
He means the iPaq, and its something else.
Oddly enough, I recall there was an HP iPod! ^.^
He said IPAQ, those are PDAs originally made by Compaq and now HP. They run Windows Mobile and actually, you know, get stuff done.
Seriously? HP makes something called an iPaq? What a ridiculous name.
I was thinking more like tablets...handwriting for iphone would suck heh...but yeah like 90% of mac users..know nothing...sad but true. I am a mac user....cept I am a PRO.
no stylus buddy
that was meant as a reply to robert. idk what happened with that
Hello macBook tablet
Forget the iPhone. Apple has tons of work ahead of them to catch up with Microsoft in handwriting recognition:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCHqMENtKkA
Holy crap, someone already linked my video in this thread. Nevermind. :D
Wow. The fact that Apple is "considering" adding functionality to the iPhone somehow makes news. You couldn't pay for this kind of publicity. Or did they?
firmware updates!
New iPhone socks tomorrow! OMGOMG!!!
Apple better be doing some serious R&D on their handwriting tech in OS X because inkwell sucks harder then a black hole. Hell Apple should just license the handwriting recog in Vista\XP Tablet PC because frankly I could be drunk, writing upside down, and using my feet and the damn thing could read my writing.
probably for the tablet they're planning on making. iPhone? Possibly. They should (and must) put Chinese hand writing recognition (and possibly even for other eastern languages that doesn't use the latin alphabet. For some it's quicker to write than type.
Given he (Steve Jobs) bashed so badly the use of a stylus on the phone, this only makes you think they're finally coming out with a decent "TabletBook" or "MacTablet".
One that finally recognizes any handwriting with no problems whatsoever.
I'd have to agree that Inkwell on the Mac sort of sucks, insofar as writing on a graphic tablet on your lap while looking at the a screen in front of you does not work. However anyone who says Inkwell technology "sucks" never used it on the Newton OS 2 or 2.1 (the last and best of the breed).
Inkwell is NOT from Paragraph (Newt OS1x handwriting was) and it is gesture, shape, acceleration and velocity based so it is light-years ahead of simple shape recognition. It also had a learning algorithm so that even though most humans cannot decipher my non-Catholic-school left-handed chickenscratch, I could write something like "Give remediation details to Tom Dellenbach when finished." (yes a real name) and it would read it - and this was WITHOUT the name being in my custom dictionary.
So any Inkwell nay-sayers, until you have seen it in person on the screen you are writing on - especially after training it - be not so quick to judge. Also as QT, Safari, and iTunes are on Windows, who is to say Apple wouldn't port Inkwell to Windows for a fee.
And keep in mind - the keyboard still beats voice recognition and handwriting recognition. Always will. I could never get Dragon or IBM's product to reliably "wreck a nice beach"!
By "port Inkwell to Windows", you really mean "shadily distribute it without the end-user's knowledge through their malware-like updater", right?
I suppose you could also mean "piggyback it as an additional application when installing some other Apple program that doesn't actually need it to function". They like doing that, too.
(ignore Josh L, he's a shill.)
"Also as QT, Safari, and iTunes are on Windows, who is to say Apple wouldn't port Inkwell to Windows for a fee. "
Quicktime, Safari and iTunes all have fairly direct revenue streams: Safari with their cut of google search ad revenue, and Quicktime and iTunes support the sales of iPods/iPhones to people on windows.
...where's the revenue from porting Inkwell?
follow the money.
What all computer companies (just just Apple) is make all screens "Touchscreens"
Face it, Multitouch is the new thing these days, and computer companies need to just face the facts that sooner or later, touch will be everything! I like the idea of having handwriting recognition into devices, makes it all more fun to use I suppose.
A number of Sony Ericsson phones have had handwriting recognition for a couple of years now. Here's the latest SE model with it:
http://www.sonyericsson.com/cws/products/mobilephones/overview/g900
If it comes it shall no doubt be hailed as a revolution, the dawn of a new era. Handwriting recognition on a phone? No way, no one's ever done anything like that before...
(/sarcasm tag, just in case)
Apparently, Inkwell software hasn't been improved upon in years whereas Vista's recognition software has been recently updated. That's not an excuse, but I believe that might account for Vista's better recognition performance. Apple had better get with improving Inkwell or licensing some other company's software.
"Apparently, Inkwell software hasn't been improved upon in years..."
Exactly - I believe it is the same feature set from late last millennium.
To update it given the number of apparent users (I use it very occasionally) seems odd; however that does portent a tablet Mac or a way to use the iPhone w/a special sytylus for text input to a Mac connected via BlueTooth.
Hey Apple...
Now give me continuous voice recognition on your products or pdas and I will purchase it...I mean voice recognition like Dragon Naturally Speaking version 9 or better...that program is incredible and I could only imagine having that on my HP iPaq or a smart phone.
I have to admit - having used a PDA probaby longer than many reading
this forum - is that voice recognition on a phone/PDA beyone simple
dialing makes one look like a total tool.
I mean it sounds fantastic and futuristic and star-trekky ("PDA from
the future-re-re-re-re"). But if you ever watched people chatting TO
their phone (not through it) or PDA it is simultaneously disturbing
and hilarious.
I've also seen people doing it and then realized they had NO phone
nor PDA...
Think about it. Handwriting recognition on a handheld device is perfect for email and text messages. Writing is so much faster than tapping it out on a screen or using a tiny, tiny keyboard. Plus, it is more natural so it is more comfortable.
I mean, when you go to someone's office or cubicle and they are not there you don't type a note on their computer. No, you use a pen and a post-it.
You know they had it "write" way back in the early 90's with the Newton.
I was one of the very early adopters, and after a better part of decade left
for Palm as newton dead ended.
It was quite nice, and it would be intriguing to see what they come up with.
I would think this become more stylus driven at that point then.