As part of its Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced Project Ink Analysis, a new service under its Cognitive Services brand of AI products that will allow developers to add support for handwriting and other shape recognition to their apps. The company says that this service will be available for Windows and other platforms.
Microsoft already offered handwriting recognition under Windows 10 as part of its overall Windows Ink support. The Cognitive Services Vision API can also read handwritten text, but not in the real-time kind of way that you would expect from an API like this. In addition, the Windows 10 touchscreen keyboard has also long supported handwriting input.
Now, however, it’s opening up this service to developers across platforms, leveraging its AI ink services in the cloud.
The company hasn’t announced any pricing information yet and we expect to hear more about how developers can actually use this API later today. We’ll update this post as we learn more.
In addition to this new API, Microsoft also today announced a new unified speech services API that brings its speech-to-text, text-to-speech, customized voice models and translation services under a single hood.
