Handwriting input comes to Gmail and Google Docs

gmailblog.blogspot.com

59 pointsAshuu4 comments

I hope I'll be able to upload scanned sheets with handwriting on them and have them recognized.

I've tried LiveScribe and various other tablet handwriting recognition and being able to take a picture of/scan a handwritten sheet and make it into a google doc would blow anything else out of the water.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how niche such a feature would be or if it would be worth their while.

Recognizing scanned handwriting is much harder than allowing handwriting as direct input from a touchscreen.

"Online" handwriting recognition takes as input pen locations over time (strokes), and outputs the corresponding words. "Offline" handwriting recognition takes an image of handwriting. It is much harder, since it has much less information.

They already have OCR for the Google Book project (I assume). And they have this project, would it be difficult to combine the two?

They also do book OCR via recaptcha[1]. If I ever see my handwriting as a captcha string, I don't know what I'd think.

[1] http://www.google.com/recaptcha

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