IBM says that its Thomas J Watson research laboratory has advanced the technology for machine recognition of cursive handwriting by approaching the problem from a different direction: in IBM’s technique, instead of waiting until a character is completed before starting to analyse it, the system gets to work from the first stroke, reducing the number of characters to which it could belong; by the time the character is complete, the number of possibilities is greatly reduced.With IBM’s Paperlike Interface, a stylus is used on a digitising tablet over a flat LCD. The system can be trained to a particular writer, and could be used to control the computer instead of a mouse.
