[ohithereyou]

That's great, but I would wager that nearly 100% of all writing ever done in human history was done without capturing the strokes while writing. Therefore, while this added accuracy is great, it is virtually useless for most written work.

[obmelvin]

Isn't that a bit irrelevant? If we are talking about patterns that work well for the user, clearly writing everything traditionally and then going back and taking pictures of everything is a cumbersome process. Writing on iPad or similar is clearly the medium in which this shines, at which point you do capture the strokes.

[ohithereyou]

That only works if you can assume that everybody using the system you're desiging has access to the underlying technology. Sure, if you're desiging some new system (like an autonomous vehicle on a closed loop, controlled system / system purpose built to perform digit recognition as it is written on it, but why wouldn't you just have the user directly input on a keypad) then you'll get a better result, but in the general, real world, case (autonomous vehicle on city streets with other vehicles / recognizing digits from scanned input without the stroke data) then your special case optimization are impossible and for all general practical purposes do not apply, so appealing to their assistance in increasing accuracy doesn't actually do anything to help the system perform better.

[dkonofalski]

While that's true, having the ability to capture strokes now allows machine-learning models to better determine what potential strokes were used to make a specific shape. Just because we didn't have it for everything doesn't mean it's not useful for adding accuracy to the past.