Can the Livescribe Pen Recognize Cursive?

You be the judge:

vanity devona war a search engine, The name
war ihnen bdtsfoe the association with
ltuhouna Matute and because someone
thought that mark enyiw should hur
two 0’s in the name (44100, 60-ogb).
Ate the tin opined about 603 of the
company was owned by the chinen
government. We meres didfczur out
what they were up to, or what. they
thought they won up to; but by
the time thy finals shutdown
they had burned through an
100 avian dollars in ayuht.

OK. I know my handwriting is bad, but it’s not that bad. From the mistakes it’s making, I suspect MyScript is doing letter recognition alone and not trying to recognize entire words or phrases.

Apparently it doesn’t do such a good job with printed text either:

Can anyone recommend a reliable, not
too expensive battery tester for
double A batteries? There are quite a few
out there;.: but the nowovhvhnhodrpwmi
wason
– need something that will tell me
how much charge is left amhhdthcd
rohs It’s time to rep head two bathers
in my flushes OV recharge them.
7.1 d/s. like to know whether the
batteries 2 have secreted ii vanoy
drown mhhouchpmhyoohets are
spares 7 never used or discharged
batteries 2 swapped out in the field.
J

Better, but still not remotely as good as typing.

Presumably this would get better with practice, but what really surprised me about trying to write in long form is that:

  1. Even though I’m an awful typist, and even if the handwriting recognition were perfect, I’m still faster typing than handwriting.
  2. Writing with the pen is actually more painful than typing. I can type for a couple of hours before I start to notice problems. Writing with the LiveScribe Pen, I didn’t even get to 200 words before my right hand was throbbing. This might be easier if the pen were more appropriately sized like a Bic rather than a Magic Marker.

At best, this pen is only useful for note taking. Ultimately, this seems like little more than an overly complex way to take a snapshot of a notebook page. Annoyingly you can’t even export that to a standard format in any obvious way. Your data is locked into Livescribe’s proprietary program. I had to print to a PDF and take a screenshot of that just to get this picture:

And that’s not even as good as the actual text! My printing is bad, but not that bad. Here’s a photo of the actual page taken with my cell phone:

Actually that doesn’t look so good either, but that’s because my cell phone camera doesn’t take such great pictures, and in this light there’s a lot of color noise. However you can see that the pen saw things that just aren’t on the paper at all. Apparently, the pen “recognizes” motions that are too close to the page but not quite close enough to make a mark with the ink on the paper.

I was hoping for something a little more conducive to writing.

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