Monday, October 5, 2020

Scribble in iPadOS 14

Alexander George (via Tim Hardwick):

In the newest update to iPadOS, when you write with the Apple Pencil ($129), the iPad can understand your scrawl and, with Scribble, convert it to typed text. It works like most machine learning—examples inform rules that help predict and interpret a totally new request—but taps into a smarter data set and greater computing power to do what had stumped generations of previous machines. While Alexa and Siri rely on a connection to faraway data centers to handle their processing, the iPad needs to be able to do all that work on the device itself to keep up with handwriting (and drawing—machine learning also helps the Notes app straighten out an imperfect doodle of a polygon, for example).

[…]

Federighi says that for Apple’s tech, static examples weren’t enough. They needed to see the strokes that formed each letter. “If you understand the strokes and how the strokes went down, that can be used to disambiguate what was being written.”

Previously:

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Seems to work fine with my Pencil_1 and newer non-Pro iPads as well.

Welcome back Newton Handwriting Recognition. Seriously.

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