Tech
imperfect doodle of a polygon, for example). That
takes way more effort than you’d think.
“When it comes to understanding [handwrit-
ing] strokes, we do data-gathering. We find people
all over the world, and have them write things,” says
Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software
engineering at Apple. “We give them a Pencil, and
we have them write fast, we have them write slow,
write at a tilt. All of this variation.” That method-
ology is distinct from the comparatively simple
approach of scanning and analyzing existing hand-
writing. Federighi says that for Apple’s tech, which
the company calls Scribble, static examples weren’t
enough. They needed to see the strokes that formed
each letter. “If you understand the strokes and how
the strokes went down, that can be used to disam-
biguate what was being written.”
That dynamic understanding of how people
write means Apple’s software can reliably know
what you’re writing as you’re writing it, but com-
bined with data on a language’s syntax, Scribble
can also predict what stroke or character or word
you’ll write next. The massive amount of statistical
calculations needed to do this are happening on the
iPad itself, rather than at a data center. “It’s gotta
be happening in real time, right now, on the device
that you’re holding,” Federighi says. “Which means
that the computational power of the device has to be
such that it can do that level of processing locally.”
The use cases for Scribble: You’re handwriting
notes on your iPad ($329 and up) with the Pencil
during a meeting, and you want to see a map of
Zanzibar. You can now swipe to the Maps app and
write “Zanzibar” into the search field, rather than
pecking at the screen’s keyboard. Or, you want to
email a few lines of those handwritten notes. You
use your finger to select that section, copy, then
paste into an email, where it shows up as if you
typed them. Or you write down a phone number,
and you can tap to call it.
If you spend $100 for an Apple Pencil, Scrib-
ble’s precision offers an additional method of input,
along with speech and the keyboard, to communi-
cate with the iPad. The use-case is narrow, but it’s a
digital bridge for handwriting die-hards, and easier
than carr ying a keyboard with your tablet. It works
so well it makes translating your writing into func-
tional text feel like a natural behavior. This is the
kind of novelty Apple introduces often, one that
feels so organic, you’ll look for excuses to use it.20 September/October 2020
4
↑
“Copy as Text”
has been added
to the selection
menu.→
Functional text
is now pasted
into any text
box in iOS.COURTESY^ APPLE^