Taking handwritten notes on digital devices

Posted by Hugh
Apr 5, 2018 at 09:31 AM

I suspect that there are a number of pieces of hardware and quite a few pieces of software that will support the use of handwriting. Personally, for hardware I like the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. But my experience of other devices has been limited (the most notable being those produced years ago under the Palm brand).

On the iPad there are of course quite a few applications that will faithfully record and save handwritten notes as graphical images of handwritten notes. Generally, the differences between these applications seem to me to be marginal.

But the real challenge, it appears to me, is to create software that will reliably and accurately convert that handwriting to text. That still seems more difficult to accomplish than to convert voice to text. Actually, Palm used to achieve both speed and accuracy with its own special form of shorthand (which I think was called Graffiti). But learning Graffiti was a potential barrier for users.

Today, the developer MyScript has been in existence a relatively long time and seems to lead the field, with its technology used by other brands even when this is not evident. I think I first bought a MyScript app close to the turn of the millennium. But even MyScript apps do not, it seems to me, match the accuracy of, say, Nuance voice-to-text software (although that itself is not perfect).

In other words, when working on a medium-form or long-form project, if you want to convert handwriting to text, you can get a better result (i.e. a more efficient combination of accuracy and speed) if you write the text out by hand and then use voice-to-text software to convert it to hardcopy, than if you rely on handwriting-to-text. Such is the state of handwriting-to-text technology currently.

Of course, I am certain that the technology will improve. But in my view it is not “ready for primetime” yet.