Can Microsoft read your chicken scratch?
ZDNet | at | by Mike
Microsoft is looking for a better way to make sense of your chicken scratch. The current version of its Tablet PC operating system, which lets computer users control their machines with a pen-like device instead of just a mouse and keyboard, matches people's scrawls against the company's own database of handwriting samples. The idea is to ensure that the unlimited variety of T's that human hands can produce will, in fact, be recognized as T's.
Even though the software, due to appear in devices Nov. 7, can match against the many different types of handwriting in its database, it can't adapt to an individual user's style of writing and learn, for example, that the person never crosses his or her T's.