It has been tried several times with different approaches. I mentioned some of them in my bachelor's thesis "Multimodal mathematical formula editing for web ser

It has been tried several times with different approaches. I mentioned some of them in my bachelor's thesis "Multimodal mathematical formula editing for web services": http://matracas.org/tacto/index.html.en http://matracas.org/tacto/index.html.en As part of that work I implemented part of the DRACULAE formula layout analysis algorithm and improved on it to allow certain disambiguations when parsing the formula: the result encoding is not presentational like LaTeX but semantical like the ones used in Computer Algebra Systems. That makes thing much more complicated and I only implemented simple notations like super/subscripts and fractions. Still, it might give you an idea of how it can be done.You can play with it here: http://matracas.org/tacto/test.html http://matracas.org/tacto/test.html Speech synthesis using the HTML5 audio API (reads aloud the formula you write) worked in several browsers including Chrome at the time, but nowadays it seems to work only in Firefox. You might combine the handwritten symbol recognition of detexify, mentioned in a sibling comment, with this layout analysis to have full handwritten recognition of formulas but it's not straightforward. Some time ago there was a story in HN about someone else's PhD thesis that went much further ahead: "SESHAT: Handwritten math expression parser" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12388407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12388407 This one is closer to what you want.