Will the merged letter die?

Under the onslaught of information technologies, absolutely familiar and understandable things start to be forgotten and fall into decay. I think everyone remembers the hours spent on cursive, in an attempt to bring out the even outlines of the letters. Many teachers of the old Soviet school believe that a consistent letter develops fine motor skills and, as a result, intelligence. But the US government decided differently: since last year, writing has become an optional subject and schools can accept students' work written in block letters: schoolchildren will only write in block letters . Let's try to understand why this happened and how modern technologies support printed letters.



How long have you been writing by hand? Modern man is much easier to scribble sms or e-mail, than to display the squiggles on paper. Signed cards from other countries have become a wonder, receiving a letter “from grandmother” is a pleasant surprise (and if we have, the very fact of receiving is already incredibly pleasant), and very few people are engaged in rewriting notes from fellow students.
Good or bad time will tell, in this article I propose to see how modern technologies allow us to speed up the processing, recognition and transmission of information.

Speech recognition

Quite recently, speech and text recognition technologies finally brought to mind have become available to the mass user. Consider the current proposals for speech recognition.
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I think Siri has already said everything that is possible, so I propose to focus on similar technologies from competitors.
The main problems of voice search, in my opinion, remain language support, the availability of fast Internet and the cost of devices powerful enough to support this technology.

Voice search from Google appeared before Siri, and after the release of the latter for a long time gave way. At the moment, everything has changed significantly. More recently, a new version of Android 4.1.1 has been released, solving a number of the problems mentioned above. The first thing you should pay attention to is the ability to offline speech recognition for search queries. Now there is no need to wait for a response from the server transmitting the answer on the slow line. There are also some outlines in solving the problem of multilingual support, at least the work with the Russian language has appeared and it is quite tolerable. The only thing that upsets so far is the absence of a large number of devices in the latest firmware version. For example, the capabilities of the recently released Nexus 7 are very encouraging:



With Microsoft and its Windows 8, it is obvious that such an important aspect is also not missed. There are many interesting and promising announcements. In reviews, the technology looks well completed and able to make a worthy competition.



I think it is impossible to ignore the complex analysis systems and their brightest representative - IBM Watson, who quite recently created a furore on the game Jeopardy !, having defeated all the famous grandmasters. At the moment, such a mechanism is not available for the average user, but IBM is adapting its solution to work in medical organizations and large companies, for example, to analyze financial market indicators.

Printed text recognition

Unlike voice recognition, the convenience and size of the device when working with text are much more important. Let's look at what manufacturers and programmers offer us today.

I think it is worth mentioning the new niche of “transformers” - portable devices that, when connected to the docking station, turn into a full-fledged computer / tablet. An interesting representative is ASUS Padfone , which was recently written on Habré. The niche of transformers is quite young, but, in my opinion, these devices are ideal for educational institutions, as there is no need to carry a healthy laptop with you, which is very important for students and schoolchildren, already loaded with textbooks, physical fitness and other equipment.

The manufacturers' interest in handwriting and typing technologies is also confirmed by the fact that Windows 8 has improved support for writing on the screen, which we have only been able to observe on some devices.



It seems to me that the merged letter is left to exist for a very short time - it will gradually be forgotten, will become another anachronism. It is much easier for a child to master printing on a computer, because all that is needed is knowing the alphabet. There will be no need to trace the hooks in the long evenings and there will be much more free time. The main thing is that this time was not spent on leveling up the character in WoW ...

I have a question for you, Habravchane. Tell me, how long have you written in words? And when, according to your forecasts, goose feathers will be abolished in Russia in penmanship in schools?