[Reason077]

> "handwriting recognition... has never gotten good enough to succeed in the marketplace against alternatives."

There is little market demand for handwriting recognition, and thus little active research goes into it. Not because it is a difficult or problematic technology, but because better alternatives exist that make it irrelevant.

Even if someone were to come up with an absolutely perfect handwriting recognition system, most people wouldn't use it. Why? because the advent of multi-touch screens means that most people can type much faster than they can hand-write anyway.

[snowwrestler]

This is all true today, but it was not true in the past. There was a time in the computing industry when everyone believed that pen interfaces with handwriting recognition would be a crucial enabler for highly mobile computing. Both Apple and Microsoft built major product launches around this idea in the early 1990s.

[Reason077]

Oh, absolutely. I remember that era well. But I'm talking about today, of course.

What changed was that touch screens became better. The old capacitive touch screens were clunky, slow, inaccurate. You could put a keyboard on them, but the lag and poor accuracy meant you couldn't really touch type comfortably. Then multitouch came along and made on-screen keyboards much more responsive and accurate.

But also, Blackberry and (pre-smartphone) phones with SMS made people more comfortable with the idea of using keyboards for text entry on handheld devices. And crucially, auto-correct and predictive text entry covered up for accuracy errors and made text entry by keyboard even more attractive.