7 ms·
Google Handwrite
- realmickey 14y agoWhen is Google's/Android's competitor to OneNote going to be available?
- stcredzero 14y agoAndroid/iOS/Metro -- whichever one has a properly executed answer to OneNote is going to succeed like gangbusters. (Putting it that way, it speaks to serious dysfunction at Microsoft if it's not them, and indeed, there's a good chance that it may not be them.)
- rhplus 14y agoYou're right that note-taking will be one of the killer apps for the next generation of tablets. OneNote for Metro ("OneNote MX") is already available in beta, so I'm guessing Microsoft is chasing that: http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/en-US/app/onenote-mx/f022389f-f3a6-417e-ad23-704fbdf57117 http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/en-US/app/onenote-mx/f02238... http://www.winsupersite.com/article/office-2013-beta2/office-2013-public-preview-metrostyle-onenote-143721 http://www.winsupersite.com/article/office-2013-beta2/office...
- ericdykstra 14y agoFun feature. Would be killer with support for non-latin based language. Imagine walking down a street in Japan, seeing a restaurant, and wanting to search for reviews. Oh no! It's written in kanji and you have a hard enough time reading basic words, much less names. Open up Google on your phone, write the kanji and add the japanese word for review behind it, and off you go. Great potential, anyway.
- positr0n 14y agoThe video shows a Japanese woman doing just that :)
- Permit 14y agoJudging from the commercial it does. Although I won't embarrass myself by guessing the language. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyeJXKfAcpc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyeJXKfAcpc
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ericdykstra 14y agoJust tested myself. You need to change the browser default language to make it work, but it does a very good job!
- wheels 14y agoThat was Japanese (Hiragana, one of the glyph forms that Japanese uses).
- w1ntermute 14y agoThe search was actually in kanji, not hiragana. And the first result (a Wikipedia page), had sakura in katakana. Sakura in kanji: 桜 Sakura in hiragana: さくら Sakura in katakana: サクラ
- T-R 14y agoIt was Japanese - it was the Kanji for sakura (桜) - hence the cherry trees in the background.
- minwcnt5 14y agoHaving to handwrite the Kanji seems like an extra step though - it'd be easier to simply take a photo.
- ken 14y agoIt's not easier if you're standing in a forest of 桜 and there's no paper and pencil around, as in the demonstration video. :-) And even if you do have it written, it may be easier for the user, but it's harder for the computer. The order and direction of strokes is standardized, and getting this information as the user writes it is tremendously valuable. I've played with handwriting recognition algorithms for kanji before, and if you assume the stroke order and direction are correct, you can make a surprisingly good algorithm with very little code. Detecting a character from an image is much harder. The iOS handwriting recognition, for one, takes this into account. iOS officially only has hanzi (Chinese) handwriting recognition, but it usually works OK for Japanese, too, as long as it's a character that both languages have. But when you run into one of the characters where Chinese and Japanese have standardized on a different stroke order, like 王, it'll never recognize it when written using the Japanese stroke order, no matter how nicely you write it.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- w1ntermute 14y agoYou can already do this on Android in any text field of your choice using the "7notes with mazec" keyboard[0]. The kanji recognition is nothing short of miraculous[1]. It's a little expensive, so check out the free 10-day trial[2] if you need any further convincing. 0: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sevenknowledge.sevennotesproduct&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sevenknowl... 1: http://i.imgur.com/rfHTu.png http://i.imgur.com/rfHTu.png 2: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sevenknowledge.sevennotestrial&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sevenknowl...
- ericdykstra 14y agoThank you for the recommendation. I haven't checked this solution out yet, but it looks fantastic! I have never seen an app with this kind of kanji recognition.
- w1ntermute 14y agoIt is indeed one of a kind. I haven't formally studied 書道 (calligraphy), but the ad hoc 行書 (cursive style of writing) I've developed out of laziness is recognized perfectly by it. If you're interested in good Android apps for Japanese, I would also urge you to check out Aedict[0] and DroidWing[1]. The latter, when combined with EPWING-format dictionaries obtained from a 3rd party source, is (IMO) just as good as any 電子辞書 (which themselves use EPWING-format dictionaries). I personally use the 研究社 新和英大辞典 第5版 and 研究社 新英和大辞典第6版 (they are, surprisingly enough, more than sufficient for classical Japanese and for kanbun), though you can also get J-J dictionaries and domain-specific ones, such as for IT or medicine. 0: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=sk.baka.aedict&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=sk.baka.aedict... 1: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aokabi.android.droidwingfree https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aokabi.and...
- ericdykstra 14y agoWow, thanks again. I'll be in Japan in a couple of weeks, and these will surely be helpful, seeing as my vocabulary is trash.
- californian 14y agoThe Google Translate app for Android does this. I was recently in Japan, and that app was invaluable. It's also pretty decent at Japanese speech to English translation.
- a3_nm 14y agoFor this use case, I'd rather take a picture of the restaurant name rather than handwriting the kanji.
- 6ren 14y agoUsing the camera would remove a step - have you seen word lens? http://questvisual.com/us/ http://questvisual.com/us/ (though it doesn't seem to support kanji).
- jenius 14y agoSometimes opening a keyboard and typing is just too efficient. Sometimes you need a technology that will slow your life down and make it more prone to errors. Google handwrite: why type when you can awkwardly scribble?
- bokonon 14y agoI agree with you, but at the same time I think it's great that somebody is at least trying to innovate the tools we have for interfacing with technology. I know handwriting recognition isn't anything new, but the idea that the keyboard is all we will ever need can only contribute to the stagnation of advancement. I'm still waiting for the day I can telepathically control all my devices.
- stcredzero 14y agoThere could be a lot done with eyeball tracking. We already have setups that can accurately determine where you will be looking a fraction of a second in the future. Eyeball tracking combined with speech or handwriting translation could be quite powerful. The eyeball tracking could provide a lot of contextual information to make speech/handwriting recognition more accurate.
- bokonon 14y agoWe already have setups that can accurately determine where you will be looking a fraction of a second in the future. Do you have a link to more information about this? That's really impressive.
- stcredzero 14y agoOne's saccade eye movements are very regular in acceleration profile, so it's possible to determine where you're going to look from the start of the saccade movement. I could not find the original reference, but there is some highly technical information here: http://books.google.com/books?id=27jCNmafYU4C&pg=PA150&lpg=PA150&dq=eye+tracking+acceleration&source=bl&ots=pPY9X7JFme&sig=-HINFhKxiUQ3yKR4T9jhUIc_qRE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=NawRUKrLBYXxigKWgYHoAQ&ved=0CFEQ6AEwBDgK#v=onepage&q=eye%20tracking%20acceleration&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=27jCNmafYU4C&pg=PA150&#...
- agscala 14y agoBasically google wants more data to improve their handwriting recognition for something else down the line. Smart move
- SubZero 14y agoNow THAT would be amazing. Incredibly smart move. What better way to create your own handwriting recognition program than to have all 4 billion people field testing it for you.
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoThey've already done that. That was the entire purpose of Google 411 (except voice instead of hand writing).
- abraham 14y agoNot for something down the line though, for the current Drive search indexing. https://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2423575 https://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans... https://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=176692 https://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans...
- dag11 14y agoThis is pretty cool, and works really well! For me, though, Jelly Bean voice search from my lock screen is still the quickest.
- setheron 14y agoMy company has forced pinpad lock screen on my jelly bean. Can't seem to find the voice search from there :(
- dag11 14y agoI use pattern unlock. But I installed WidgetLocket to give me a primary lockscreen where I was able to make one of the swipe positions a Google Now shortcut, and another position a Google Now Voice Search shortcut, in addition to the two existing positions of a Camera shortcut and the Unlock shortcut.
- ramanujam 14y agoDraw a heart and it'll spell it out. Nice!
- Splines 14y agoIt also handles diacritics too, which is handy.
- grantjgordon 14y agoThis works remarkably well. I'm shocked.
- RandallBrown 14y agoyeah, I've done handwriting with a stylus on windows and mac before and had much worse results than I'm getting with my finger on this. Very impressive.
- pragmatic 14y agoNote: This doesn't seem to work on an Opera mobile browser. Seems to work ok in the default android browser.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoGoogle doesn't release mobile products for any browser except WebKit. They specifically whitelist.
- mikek 14y agoI wonder if, like (800) GOOG-411, the primary reason Google is doing this is to gather data.
- mikek 14y agoWhy am I being downvoted for this?
- jonursenbach 14y agoEverything Google does is to gather data.
- deelowe 14y agoWell, their mission is to organize all of the world's information. So, yea. I think this is probably about gathering data.
- mtgx 14y agoI wonder, do latest versions of Android have support for 3rd party Wacom styluses? Although I'm not sure Wacom even sells 3rd party styluses for capacitive tablets that are as accurate as Samsung's S-pen or those old Windows tablets. The reason I'm asking is because I'd like to buy say a Nexus tablet to use with a stylus, but want the same level of accuracy as Samsung's S-pen or better, without having to buy Samsung's Galaxy Note devices. Do those need a special panel as well to have that kind of accuracy, do they only require that Android has the necessary API's and the support for those styluses?
- swombat 14y agoTechCrunch appears to be mostly unreadable on the iPad, thanks to their fancy template reloading/redirecting... Smart.
- dredmorbius 14y agoMostly unreadable on many platforms, along with their affiliate sites, especially with JS disabled.
- jonknee 14y agoIn case anyone is interested, I watched the network requests go by to see how it works. Google is doing the detection server side (no surprise there, but it was smooth enough that I had to check) and receives the drawing area (writing_area_width, writing_area_height), the "ink" which is an array of points and any already existing characters in the search field. The return data is the best guesses for the input. Curious that multiple options are returned, I'm not sure how those are used. Another AJAX request is made for Google Instant.
- dredmorbius 14y agoAs anyone who mastered PalmOS's grafitti can attest, sometimes writing on a PDA / smartphone is a lot more usable than typing, especially on a soft keyboard. Input remains the weak point to many or most of these devices.
- gbog 14y agoThe beta version of Swype is really a major improvement. I'say I can write faster on my phone than on my pc, under certain conditions. The much slower part is copyediting, but it is mostly because sites like hn break the flow with some fancy textarea tweaks.
- wasd 14y agoI wasn't able to the setting pages on Chrome while I was signed in. Am I blind or was this a UI oversight?
- tonfa 14y agoOn the bottom of the search homepage.
- darkstalker 14y agoCan this be activated on desktop?
- tsahyt 14y agoFrom a technical point of view this is remarkable. Seems like the recognition works really well, and that's great. However, from a usability point of view this is probably awful. I've had an app on my phone for a while now that doesn't do handwriting recognition but just stores the handwritten stuff as images. Using that without a proper pen-like stylus is a pain. Writing with your fingers just doesn't really work. Fingertips are just not accurate enough for this kind of movement, which is precisely why we guide a pen with multiple fingers instead of just one. Additionally it's much slower than just typing it out, even on the sucky on-screen-keyboard that you're provided with these days. So it's slow and surprisingly hard to use. And frankly, I don't see styluses making their big comeback next year. People are just too addicted to touching things with their fingers.
- dazbradbury 14y agoOK, so Google want to improve their handwriting recognition. Fine. But from a users point of view this just tells me one thing: - Using an on-screen keyboard is such a pain for people that Google changed their HOMEPAGE to accommodate this. Why does this irritate me? 1) None of the latest generation of smartphones are coming out with a hardware keyboard. The best are always keyboardless. 2) Stylus-based input, which is the other extremely fast form of text entry, has all but died out (I know some products still exist - but it was essentially dead when capacitive screens won out). Hence, we've gone backwards from 10 years ago. It was faster for me to send a text/email from my phone 10 years ago then it is today. That is hugely disappointing.
- asto 14y agoYes, this exactly. I desperately want to move from my Blackberry to an android phone but all the best phones seem keyboard-less. Typing on a touch screen is a major annoyance for anything more than typing a search string or sms.
- hessenwolf 14y agoGo horizontal and use two thumbs. You get pretty quick. There are likely other techniques.
- ivanilla 14y agoIt doesn't work on my iPhone with iOS 4. Anyone else having problem getting it to work?
- danyork 14y agoI'll note that despite the Techcrunch headline about Google Handwrite accepting cursive handwriting, it doesn't really do so. In fact, Google's help pages specifically say you should use block printing versus cursive. I tried some cursive and the recognition didn't work all that well. However, the block printing was generally quite accurate. I wrote about some of my views on this at: http://www.disruptiveconversations.com/2012/07/google-now-lets-you-handwrite-search-queries-on-ipad-iphone-android.html http://www.disruptiveconversations.com/2012/07/google-now-le... I actually see a great value to it for times when I'm walking around a conference with my iPad and want to do a quick Google search. I can't really use voice (i.e. Siri) and I can't use two hands to type. This handwriting could be an interesting option.