Handwriting recognition is a "hard" problem, and the Newton tried to take it on directly, with more or less success. Other companies went for workarounds. Som

Handwriting recognition is a "hard" problem, and the Newton tried to take it on directly, with more or less success. Other companies went for workarounds. Some people retrained humans to write in such a way that the PDA could easily recognize it, e.g. Palm with their Graffiti writing system used with PalmOS. Others just put a keyboard on the device, as in the early WinCE devices, and which reached the pinnacle of evolution on the Blackberry. Then smartphone makers just turned that into a software keyboard on the screen, which is what we see in iOS and Android. Now, the big thing is voice recognition, which is also a "hard" problem. But we no longer need to seek workarounds the way we did with handwriting recognition, for two reasons: first, because the phone itself now contains much more processing power than the early PDAs did, and second (and more important), the evolution of high-speed wireless networking makes it not only possible, but feasible, to offload the "hard" parts of voice recognition to an even more powerful server somewhere on the Internet. Which enables, not only voice recognition, but software agents like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. One day there will likely be a breakthrough somewhere that makes the gap between handwriting recognition and voice recognition look like child's play. I'm not sure what that will be. Maybe direct brain interfacing, as in William Gibson's or Jim Strickland's science-fiction universes, or as in John Scalzi's "BrainPal"? (Taken from some musings I wrote on Facebook back in 2018)