5 ms·

Having to handwrite the Kanji seems like an extra step though - it'd be easier to simply take a photo.

• ken 14y ago
  It'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.