News Lernstift Linux-powered pen turns to Kickstarter

The trouble is accurate handwriting recognition is HARD to do.

Kids also twist and turn their pens and change their writing speed on the fly. They also go back and correct letters they've already written. A motion sensor based ben is going to have it's work cut out to translate kids writing into useful data.

Kids leaning to write and spell don't write in a way that makes it easy for handwriting recognition software to use easily ( I have 6yo twins - trust me! ). So even if you can capture the data correctly recognising it will be very difficult.

The lernstift guys are only at the stage where they're recognising 'block' characters and have managed two four character words.

They have a long way to go before this is ready for their intended uses. Looks like the hardware is okay but the software looks like it needs a LOT of work.

 

I think OCR technologies in general need to improve. However this is a nice principle but not for my handwriting as it is awful.

 

Just like moving sidwalks, flying cars, etc - we should damn well have OCR that doesn't suck now that we're well into the 21st century.

I was just messing with it the other day, hoping to find OCR that could work with scanned documents - it's a hair better than it was when I last tried a few years ago, but it's still faster to just retype it from the hard copy