Microsoft has been working on handwriting recognition for over 15 years going back to the Pen extensions for Windows 3.0.  With the increased integration and broad availability of the handwriting components present in Windows Vista we continue to see increased use of handwriting with Windows PCs.  We see many customers using handwriting across a wide variety of applications including schools, hospitals, banking, insurance, government, and more.  It is exciting to see this natural form of interaction used in new scenarios.  Of course one thing we need to continue to do is improve the quality of recognition as well as the availability of recognizers in more languages around the world.  In this post, Yvonne, a Program Manager on our User Interface Platform team, provides a perspective on engineering new recognizers and recognition improvements in Windows 7.  --Steven

Hi, my name is Yvonne and I’m a Program Manager on the Tablet PC and Handwriting Recognition team. This post is about the work we’ve done to improve recognition in handwriting for Windows 7.

Microsoft has invested in pen based computing since the early 1990s and with the release of Windows Vista handwriting recognizers are available for 12 languages, including USA, UK, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, and Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese and Korean. Customers frequently ask us when we plan to ship more languages and why a specific language is not yet supported. We are planning to ship new and improved languages for Windows 7, including Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Russian, and Polish, and the list continues to grow. Let’s explore what it takes to develop new handwriting recognizers.

Windows has true cursive handwriting recognition, you don’t need to learn to write in a special way – in-fact, we’ve taught (or “trained” as we say) Windows the handwriting styles of thousands of people and Windows learns more about your style as you use it. Over the last 16 years we’ve developed powerful engines for recognizing handwriting, we continue to tune these to make them more accurate, faster and to add new capabilities, such as the ability to learn from you in Vista. Supporting a new language is much more than adding new dictionaries – each new language is a major investment. It starts with collecting native handwriting, next we analyze the data and go through iterations of training and tuning, and finally the system gets to you and continues to improve as you use it.

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