Back in February I wrote about my latest gadget – the LiveScribe Pulse pen. I’ve been using it extensively since then and am very pleased with it.
But I’ve just discovered that the update to the Mac software I installed a month ago has a very significant new feature: search. Yes, it recognises enough of your writing to do a remarkably good job at searching it. Anyone who knows my writing knows that this is no mean feat.
Of course, this is the easy way to do handwriting recognition: you don’t actually have to transcribe it, you just have to work out a few possible interpretations which might match, with various degrees of probability, the thing being searched for.
It’s the same technique we used to search video mail archives and TV broadcasts back at ORL… you didn’t have to recognise the speech perfectly, you just had to get close enough that when someone searched for a word you could list the things that might be a match in rough order of probability.
It’s still incredibly useful, though!
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