Cursive Handwriting at Windows Comdex Exhibit

Microsoft’s booth at Comdex featured over 200 exhibitors of third party applications and hardware platforms running Windows. Among these were some twenty five companies showing hardware or software specifically for Windows for Pen Computing. Most of the PenWindows exhibitors have been covered previously in this newsletter and were not showing new products.

The most interesting exhibits were the two cursive handwriting recognition engines from Lexicus, a small start-up company based in Palo Alto, California, and Paragraph International, the Russian company with offices in Boulder, Colorado.

The Lexicus cursive engine is called Longhand and a beta version is available directly from Lexicus. Longhand uses a 25,000 word dictionary to which you can add words as you work. The recognition accuracy for lower case cursive handwriting was remarkable. We worked with the product for several minutes, writing a variety of words in our sloppy cursive style, and Longhand recognized over 90% of them. On the negative side, the current version of Longhand does not recognize capital letters or numbers, and is also easily fooled by spaces. In addition, Lexicus does not have optical character recognition capability. Nevertheless, Longhand is very impressive for a beta product, and promises to improve in future versions.

A prototype version of Paragraph’s Calligrapher was also on display and we were frankly a little disappointed by its performance and accuracy. Although Calligrapher does handle both capitalization and numbers as well as optical character recognition, its accuracy rate was far lower than Longhand’s. The demonstrators assured us, however, that a training session with Calligrapher would cure the accuracy problem. On the positive side, Calligrapher has a good Windows-like interface for training the recognizer and for adding words to the dictionary. A commercial release of Calligrapher is scheduled for release in early 1993.

Paragraph International appears to be further along in providing a complete cursive recognition package. The company has contracts with Microsoft, Apple, and some other major players in the pen industry. Clearly, the optical character recognition capability will be a major selling point in the commercial version. At the same time, Lexicus Longhand shows a lot of promise and may become a strong competitor if the company can garner some initial support and invest more resources into refining the technology. In any case, both Paragraph and Lexicus demonstrated at Comdex that cursive recognition is not that far away and promises to be a viable technology in pen computers in the near future.

Contact:

Lexicus
345 Forest Avenue
Palo Alto, CA 94301
415-323-4771
Fax: 415-323-4772

Paragraph International
1035 Pearl St., Suite 304
Boulder, CO 80302
303-443-8777
Fax: 303-449-2975