IOGEAR Releases New Digital Scribe

I don't normally brag about new tech toys until they are actually available and I have had a chance to test them, but this one is pretty cool, and I think that it may be something that people, especially those of us in the corporate world, might really be able to use.

IOGEAR just released an announcement about a new device known as the Digital Scribe (Model # GPEN100C) Click here to see the product info on their website.

Basically, this is how it works...

You plug the sensor into a USB port on your computer and attach the sensor to the top of a notepad or piece of paper. The pen that is included is actually a combination pen/transmitter that relays everything you write to the sensor at the top of the page, where it is fed to the computer and transcribed.

The transcription is, from what I can tell, the coolest part about the whole thing. Based on demonstrations from IOGEAR and the description on their site, the included software, "My Script Notes v 2.1 Lite", is a pretty powerful OCR that can recognize handwriting and convert it to typed text. It is also smart enough to recognize drawings and pictures and convert them to JPEGs, so that you end up with a nice clean document of what you wrote.

I still have a couple of concerns, though. First, every demo I have seen and every picture I can find shows the sensor clipped to a fairly small notepad. I don't know about you, but I like to have a larger sheet of paper if I am really going to be drawing diagrams or flow charts, so it will be interesting to see if the size of the page has anything to do with the accuracy of the receiver.

The second concern that I have is about how well the My Script Notes software really works. I have used a lot of different OCR software in the past to scan handwritten notes and I have never been very impressed. Just by their nature, they normally don't understand what I want when I draw something. Sure, I want it to transcribe the paragraph of text, but I would rather it not mess with the labels on my cute little diagram. There was a reason that I wrote "My Work" next to the circle instead of the sqare; I don't want my software moving that around.

Having the software running while you are writing may be a good way to avoid this. If there is some sort of pen-gesture to indicate to the software, "I don't want you to transcribe this," maybe it will solve all of my problems.

Also, I am not convinced that the whole thing is worth the price yet. I have manager to survive meeting after meeting using handwritten notes, and I don't normally find myself cursing the heavens that I can't easily share the doodles on the corner of the page or the dumb little notes I wrote, but I can definitely see the benefit of being able to archive it all.

I guess I'll have to wait and see what kind of response it gets, and maybe try it out firsthand, before I can make any official judgement.