When I was a graduate student at Brown I was advised by Andy van Dam and was a member of the 'Microsoft Center for Research on Pen-Centric Computing' (http://pen.cs.brown.edu/)
The research group had developed an in-house math recognition engine that was very impressive but required some training and relied on some heuristics that worked for the group but likely wouldn't work for a general population. The math recognition engine was built out of necessity because Microsoft's previous math reco was terrible.
Gates, being a huge proponent of natural human interfaces and the pen in general, and the folks at Microsoft have put major efforts toward what's going into 7. They actually had two different teams working on math reco, one in China and one in a European center. The China team came out to visit us once and their engine was driven by a massive corpus of user-written input. From the sound of things their engine was further along so I wouldn't be surprised if this is what is in 7.
Microsoft has poured significant resources into handwriting recognition development, internal research, and external research. 7's support is going to be the best we've ever seen.
Have you heard of the formula recognized in the example above? You haven’t J, well, it’s the Schwarz formula used in complex analysis!
I wonder if the "J," in this article caption is a typo (or "handwriting-o"?) for a question mark, caused by using the handwriting recognition system to write the article?
More probably a font-transliteration issue. J in Wingdings is a smiley. I often see it in Outlook emails received in Thunderbird where the sender typed a smiley, outlook converted it to a Wingdings smiley, then it got converted into plain ASCII.
Not being a big fan of tablet PCs and pen input, if the math input works as good as it seems, I can definitely see how that would have made entering formulas in my masters thesis a million times quicker.
For most (in the western part of the world) these are probably rather niche features, but it still looks like solid work: It reads kanjis better than I do :)
The research group had developed an in-house math recognition engine that was very impressive but required some training and relied on some heuristics that worked for the group but likely wouldn't work for a general population. The math recognition engine was built out of necessity because Microsoft's previous math reco was terrible.
Gates, being a huge proponent of natural human interfaces and the pen in general, and the folks at Microsoft have put major efforts toward what's going into 7. They actually had two different teams working on math reco, one in China and one in a European center. The China team came out to visit us once and their engine was driven by a massive corpus of user-written input. From the sound of things their engine was further along so I wouldn't be surprised if this is what is in 7.
Microsoft has poured significant resources into handwriting recognition development, internal research, and external research. 7's support is going to be the best we've ever seen.