Have you heard of any user reports regarding the digital pen put out by Ericsson? http://www.anoto.com/technology/anotopen/
Handwriting has its advantages and disadvantages. Startup time is fast (pick up a pen and paper), it is highly portable, but
editability and legibility are limited. There are many people in my office who still regularly jot stuff down on a pads of paper
while working at their computers.
I tried once for a few weeks of making my desk space "paper free," taking all notes and scribbles with a text editor or mail client.
I loved the idea of having total control of my data and a clean, spartan desk to boot. However this method wound up being too
inconvenient for lots of information types that simply were not worth the overhead of storing on my pc. I suppose that data life
span, importance, relationship to other data, and so forth should determine the appropriate methods of input and retrieval.
Trivial, short-lived data is essential to us all and just the sort of thing a pen, scrap of paper or notebook is good for. And for
this kind of data, editablity or legibiltiy are unlikely to be issues of concern. Or so it would seem still.
Nick May wrote that
"Handwriting is a very inefficient way of inputting a broad range of data.
Now I think about it, I don't handwrite any more even on paper. As for
Japanese kids handwriting kanji?! Ha! - They have forgotten most of it by
the time they are 23..."
I have to admit I don't handwrite nearly as much as I did growing up before the ubiquitous spread of computers. Nevertheless, I am
probably more frustrated when caught without a pen and something write on rather than a keitai. Perhaps a strange, and quaint,
statement to some on this list, but I think it is easy to underestimate how much we really rely on low tech scrawling.
Indeed handwriting sucks for large amounts of data. But consider drawing freehand maps, sketches, diagrams. These things can be
cumbersome to input into a computer and impossible into a phone (except via photo, and then you have a host of other issues).
There are a few issues here which tend to get muddled up: how to record data (typing, writing, photography, speech), and how to
access it. Handwriting is very efficient for "inputting" some data types. But it kinda sucks for data access (scraps of paper,
illegibilty, blah blah). A digital pen, if it works well, is really just the equivalent of a microphone for a voice or a camera for
the eyes. Of course displaying handwriting on a keitai would require more computing power than displaying characters for now, but
this only a temporal issue, not a theoretical one.
Christian
----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Turner" <leap@gol.com>
To: <keitai-l@appelsiini.net>
Sent: Saturday, January 05, 2002 1:17 AM
Subject: (keitai-l) Re: handwriting as Japanese input method for the keitai
>
> Now that mainstream keitai (and peripherals thereof) can take digital
> photos, there's a potential new handwriting input modality: write something
> on paper, take digital photos of the page, and pass the images to an OCR
> system.
>
> Don't everybody start laughing at once.
>
> You'd probably need to oversample quite a lot, combining the images to
> simulate adequate resolution. You know, like how the Hubble telescope was
> hacked to handle that dent in its mirror? (OK, OK. But it could be done.)
>
> (This could be kinda cool even without the OCR, come to think of
> it--neanderthals like me, who keep a handwritten address book, could archive
> every scribbled contact-list change on the spot, with a keitai button press,
> and could stop worrying about losing everybody's address and phone number
> like I seem to do every six months.)
>
> Even with adequate resolution, though, you'd still have the handwriting OCR
> problem. This is about as hard as speech recognition, even if it doesn't
> get as much attention.
>
> Both speech recognition and handwriting OCR suffer from a similar
> user-acceptance problem: if you're not doing it really, REALLY well, it's
> not worth doing it at all. 98% correct doesn't cut it--at that level of
> accuracy, you end up spending as much or more effort supplying the 2%
> corrections as you would if you just typed the text straight in manually.
> You need more like 99.5%+, and that is a tall order, given how hard it can
> be to read your own handwriting, or make out what you said on tape.
>
> Maybe there's some hope, though, in mobile phones being speech input devices
> as well--a dumb speech recognizer taking noisy audio input might correct a
> lot of the mistakes of a dumb handwriting OCR program scanning smudgy pages;
> and vice versa. Especially when using a pronunciation dictionary for
> narrowing the choices.
>
> This is not a new idea: Some years back, when I fancied myself an OCR
> researcher, I was casting about for the various algorithmic components for
> such a system, and I ran across some work done at IBM Watson on this very
> approach. But exactly.
>
> And I thought I was so smart there for a few days. :-(
>
> The IBM researchers recorded test subjects speaking from texts, and put the
> recordings through what was probably ViaVoice in embryo. They scanned the
> same linguistic corpus written out by hand into a research-toy handwriting
> OCR program. Then they combined the input using a fairly rudimentary
> sequence analysis of the candidate recognition choices from both input
> sources. (Rudimentary compared to the human genome project, anyway.)
>
> Overall recognition rates soared. They were almost ... acceptable, even.
>
> It's not hard to see how this works.
>
> For example: We all say "innurnet", mostly, in speech. A not-too-bright
> speech recognizer might hear this as "inner net" (points for trying) and
> guess wildly that it could also be "internet" (please please) or "in a net"
> (oh no not again).
>
> An infuriatingly dense OCR program might at least see one word here, rather
> than three; a slightly less moronic one might suggest candidates like
> "interned", "intoned", "internet" or "intranet", by the scrawled look of it.
>
> And a cretinous sequence analyzer with a freshly-laundered drool-bib,
> consulting a dictionary, might pronounce "internet" the winner, even if the
> separate sources didn't rank this interpretation so highly. It's a point of
> overlap among the candidates, and anyway,"interned" and "intoned" don't
> sound much like "innurnet" when you look up their pronunciations, so they're
> easy to throw out. And "internet" is closer to "innurnet" than is
> "intranet." (Most of the time. This one gets me in trouble.)
>
> Thus do three idiot children end up with a higher combined IQ, IF they have
> a dictionary with pronunciations. Sometimes you get lucky.
>
> This scheme has its limits in English, it turns out. The lower-case vowel
> letters "aeou" exhibit a wide range of colorful pronunciations, most of them
> indistinguishable from "uh". When written, they are easily confused with
> each other (and with "c", "r", "n", etc.) even if you're not an OCR program.
> (I do this all the time, when I'm not busy drooling.) A mutter here, a
> scribble there ... you can imagine it. Soon you'd be back to proof-reading
> at the keyboard, backspacing through the audio, muttering threats and
> scribbling notes like "FIRE the people who signed off on this hellish thing!
> No, TORTURE them first!"
>
> Japanese undoubtedly has its own problems, but it might be better suited in
> both its sound system and its writing system to this
> hit-'em-twice-from-different-angles approach. One could make a case.
>
> And the relevant recognition technologies have improved since the original
> studies anyway. After all, ViaVoice is shrinkwrap now. (If we don't have
> ViaScribble it's because the obvious market for it--the legal
> profession--mainly produces impenetrable drivel anyway.)
>
> Lack of horsepower on the handset side need not be a bottleneck. It could
> be done server-side for the most part. The world is, after all, awash in
> server capacity at this point, what with C&W buying Exodus (or was it the
> remains of PSInet? I can't keep up.)
>
> In the end, though, even with excellent combined recognition rates, you have
> those market-definition and user-acceptance problems. Who's going to use
> this? When? Where? How often? For what purposes? Isn't it a lot of
> trouble to write something out and then speak it? Or, what's worse, to
> speak something and then listen to your own droning voice played back,
> writing out what you said, hitting the "backspace" button a zillion times?
>
> The saving grace of on-line character recognition in handhelds is that it's
> a bit like talking on the phone: very interactive and relatively economical
> in its use of public space (even if it might not be compact enough and
> convenient enough to be very popular for mobile phones--I have my doubts.)
> Writing by hand, on paper, off-line, is a process that tends to sprawl,
> spatially and temporally. It's not truly mobile--it's hard to do it
> standing up, for example. Pen input also has a social precedent: taking
> notes on paper notepads. Speech input doesn't; it tends to make people
> self-conscious.
>
> So maybe this approach I outline fits in somewhere, in the mainstream; it's
> certainly nice that you could do it now, probably, with
> off-the-shelf-technology, but ...
>
> Thumbtyping is a nice cultural match to the modern world--especially the
> modern Japanese world. I'm always struck, when I watch thumbtyping, by how
> private, and laconic, and physically ... tidy and unobtrusive it is. Rather
> like the Japanese themselves. I think thumbtyping is going to be hard to
> replace. Or even to supplement; there might not be much of a mobile market
> for the kinds of input that thumbtyping doesn't accommodate very well.
>
> Anyway, what we really need are PPAs: Personal Protoplasm Assistants. I
> think they used to call them "secretaries."
>
> -michael turner
> leap@gol.com
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Paul Lester" <paul.lester@lincmedia.co.jp>
> To: <keitai-l@appelsiini.net>
> Sent: Wednesday, January 02, 2002 3:35 PM
> Subject: (keitai-l) Re: handwriting as Japanese input method for the keitai
>
>
> >
> > My guess is that :
> >
> > About 2 years ago, someone in Japan
> > starting selling a touch screen phone. It flopped completely.
> > I think its because of that consumer response that no Japanese
> > company has tried anything similar with keitais....
> [snip]
>
>
> This mail was sent to address cmolstrom@lightsurf.com
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>
Received on Sun Jan 6 07:34:04 2002