Windows 7 Ink Input and Math Handwriting Recognition

The research group had developed an in-house math recognition engine that was very impressive but required some training and relied on some heuristics that worked for the group but likely wouldn't work for a general population. The math recognition engine was built out of necessity because Microsoft's previous math reco was terrible.

Gates, being a huge proponent of natural human interfaces and the pen in general, and the folks at Microsoft have put major efforts toward what's going into 7. They actually had two different teams working on math reco, one in China and one in a European center. The China team came out to visit us once and their engine was driven by a massive corpus of user-written input. From the sound of things their engine was further along so I wouldn't be surprised if this is what is in 7.

Microsoft has poured significant resources into handwriting recognition development, internal research, and external research. 7's support is going to be the best we've ever seen.

I wonder if the "J," in this article caption is a typo (or "handwriting-o"?) for a question mark, caused by using the handwriting recognition system to write the article?

For most (in the western part of the world) these are probably rather niche features, but it still looks like solid work: It reads kanjis better than I do :)