IBM Announces Handwriting Recognition Products for the OEM Market

May 24, 1993 — IBM’s Entry Systems Technology-Personal Systems (EST-PS) business unit Monday announced handwriting recognition products available for original equipment manufacturer (OEM) customers, continuing a commitment to provide industry-leading techniques to the OEM market.

IBM EST will be the first in the industry to debut technology that recognizes both script and block print writing — ThinkWrite Unconstrained. In addition, the company introduced enhancements to IBM’s current ThinkWrite discrete recognizer. Both of these technologies were jointly developed by the IBM EST Boca Raton laboratory and the T.J. Watson Research Laboratories in Hawthorne and Almaden.

The products will be demonstrated at Spring COMDEX in Atlanta, May 24-27, in booth number 624.

“As an industry leader, IBM’s long-term goal is to deliver high-performance technology solutions while recognizing the changing needs of OEM customers in today’s marketplace,” said Hum Cordero, IBM PS director of OEM and Technology Licensing. “Today’s handwriting recognition announcements demonstrate IBM’s commitment to providing innovative, breakthrough technology product offerings for the OEM market.”

Resulting from several years of IBM research and development, ThinkWrite Unconstrained handwriting recognition is capable of handling a mixture of both continuous cursive and block printing in the same text enabling pen computer users to write in a much more natural style.

ThinkWrite Unconstrained also offers the unique ability for users to personalize their systems for their individual writ-ing styles, providing them with further improved recognition accuracy.

New versions of ThinkWrite will have significantly improved accuracy through a unique hybrid approach that integrates two recognition technologies into a single engine.

This approach combines IBM’s current shape matching technology with an emerging neural network technology. When combined with the personalization available through ThinkWrite’s training, the resulting accuracy is unequaled in the industry.

In addition to the currently available PenPoint version, ThinkWrite will be available this year in versions that run under OS/2 and Windows for Pen Computing.

ThinkWrite is now available in the following national languages: U.S. English, U.K. English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

Note To Editors: OS/2 is a trademark of IBM Corp. Windows for Pen Computing is a trademark of Microsoft Corp.
CONTACT:
IBM Corp.
Alan Macher, 407/443-0010
Amy Arutt, 914/642-5553
or
GCI Group
Christine Bock, 714/587-6946