It has some convenient gestures which the Newton OS 2.x HWR engine doesn’t, but aside that, is generally almost as accurate as the Newton OS 2.x HWR engine. I tried to switch from my trusty Newton 2100u to an iPAQ running PocketPC and CalliGrapher 6 and have used CG6 quite a bit. It recognizes my handwriting with 99.9% accuracy.
In the Newton OS 2.x series of devices (120, 130, 2000, 2100, eMate), Apple used it’s own, in-house HWR software.
Although I’ve not done research to find this out, I would expect that Microsoft simply licensed ParaGraph’s desktop product based on this engine, PenOffice for use within Windows when Apple announced InkWell. Microsoft licensed the CalliGrapher engine, and bundles it under the name Transcriber in PocketPC 2002 (it can be downloaded for PocketPC 2000). Fortunately, the ParaGraph HWR engine (aka CalliGrapher) has been developed over the years and is now the basis for CalliGrapher for PocketPC and PenOffice for desktop Windows. This engine, as many people remember, sucked hard. In the Newton OS 1 series of devices (OMP, 100, 110, 120), Apple used a HWR engine from ParaGraph. I guess there’s just something to be said for respectable journalism. Oh wait I do know! He works for the *REAL* news magazine FORBES! Not the Microsoft Drone FUD peddling Why he didn’t just sit there and accept what he was fed by Microsoft, I’ll never know. exceptional, good, poor) evaluation of the speech reco. How embarassing it must have been for poor Manes, requesting a qualitative (i.e. Yes, yes, shame on Stephen Manes for not removing his undergarments as to allow a less restrictive path for the microsoft smoke to flow through his nether regions. This didn’t satisfy Manes, and embarrassment ensued as his demands got more and more irrational.
Alexandra Loeb, the VP for Tablet PC Division at Microsoft explained that the company didn’t have any relevant numbers per se, because the results vary from person to person. WINSUPERSITE writes: At the reviewer’s workshop I attended, Forbes columnist Stephen Manes precipitated a rather ugly moment when he demanded that Microsoft tell him, qualitatively, how well the speech recognition in XP Tablet PC Edition works.