The tech giant has been wasting its time developing new feature for Gmail and Google Docs to allow people to hand write their emails and documents. However, the feature does nothing useful like allowing the use of a radio controlled pen able to write on a notebook and translating the writing into text on a screen. Instead the users will have to use a computer mouse or trackpad.



The tech giant claimed that the new feature can help students trying to include a foreign phrase in their paper. It seems that they can use their own handwriting to input words directly into Gmail and Google Docs with the mouse or trackpad. Obviously, this isn’t for English users, as they can simply type the word in. But Google believes that in some languages writing with a mouse is easier – for example, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi and for some reason even Russian, though Putin kids are using Cyrillic, which is quite similar to Latin letters.

The tech giant promised that the feature will be supported for over 20 languages in Google Docs and over 50 in Gmail. Google claims that handwriting input makes the worldwide web easier to use by people in all corners of the world and also represents a larger effort to break the barrier between languages.

In the meantime, industry experts point out that Google has missed a trick here – the two areas of computing that have been the weakest in development are optical character recognition and handwriting analysis. Taking into account that most people find it easier and faster to type, handwriting has gone down the gurgler even though it remains the easiest interface possible.