Category: Geeks r Us
Just found an article about how computers are being able to recognize handwriting and was quite impressed as to its implications for blind people because, if they're doing this, then certainly scanning programs that can recognize and read out handwriting couldn't be far behind, could it? Then again, don't answer that. In any case, I hope I'm not violating any copyright laws by posting a link to this article, but I'm only sharing this because of what a boon it could be to those of us who still often have to have things read out to us because they were written by a real person and not printed out by a computer.
http://www.sci-tech-today.com/news/Take-Note--AI-Just-Got-a-Lot-Smarter/story.xhtml?story_id=032001T5AQYO
If it ever reaches a point that computers can recognize handwriting, it will indeed be a great thing. Currenly OCR is still rather limited. The only thing I'm not sure of is how they'd do it. Handwriting has a lot of different nuances. I mean, one person's handwriting an look entirely different, even though there's certainly some established framework. That and, as far as I've seen, OCR can't even read printed text which has been written by pen.