Of Apple, voice recognition, pen input and computers in China.
via MacCentral
by Dennis Sellers
>Apparently, Apple has already done some intensive work on voice
recognition and pen input for the Mac OS, two features we'd like to
see in Mac OS X (see yesterday's story).
The cover story for the ACM (Association for Computing) magazine,
interactions, discusses the first native language input for the
Chinese. The work is being done by - guess who? - Apple's Asian
division. It uses a - guess what? - combination of voice recognition
and pen input. (You can check out the "Interactions in Chinese:
designing interfaces for Asian languages" article by Heiko Sacher,
in interactions, Vol. V, No. 5, Sept./Oct. 1998, pages 28-38.)
All other Chinese input methods use a western keyboard, which is
foreign to most Chinese. The lack of an input method is being cited
as a major obstacle to acceptance of computers in Asia. While one
in three households in the US have a computer, only one in 20
households in Taiwan have a computer, and only one in 300
households in China have a computer.
Interestingly, Singapore has the same household-computer ratio
as the US. Apparently, the biggest difference between Singapore
and Taiwan is that Singapore has English as the official language
and Taiwan has Mandarin. So, Apple was working on voice input
and pen recognition input methods for the Mac OS.<
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