Google is putting the final touches on a new API for digital ink recognition for Android and iOS. It will give developers the ability to create a new breed of apps where a stylus would be the the primary mode of interaction with the displays. This is not just going to be great for a new breed of writing tablets, but also give digital note taking devices that run E INK, an alternative to using a WACOM screen.
Digital Ink Recognition is different from the existing Vision and Natural Language APIs in ML Kit, as it takes neither text nor images as input. Instead, it looks at the user’s strokes on the screen and recognizes what they are writing or drawing.
This new system supports an autodraw sketch recognizer, an emoji recognizer, and a basic shape recognizer. It also can work offline, so a WIFI connection is not needed.
Digital Ink Recognition supports 300+ languages and 25+ writing systems including all major Latin languages, as well as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Cyrillic, and more. Classifiers parse written text into a string of characters .
If you would like to start using Digital Ink Recognition in your mobile app, head over to the documentation or check out the sample apps for Android and iOS to see the API in action. For questions or feedback, please reach to Google via community channels.
Markus lives in San Francisco, California and is the video game and audio expert on Good e-Reader! He has a huge interest in new e-readers and tablets, and gaming.
