The iink SDK offers our industry partners the world's best handwriting recognition and the most powerful ink management for digital devices. iink is also the engine that drives our multi-platform digital notebook, Nebo.
But there are lots of digital inks on the market. What makes iink special?
What is digital ink?
Digital ink lets you write or draw by hand using a pen, stylus or touch inputs on devices like tablets, smartphones, e-readers, in-car displays, interactive displays and digital notebooks. Yet ordinary digital ink offers a limited experience, for two main reasons:
- It captures your handwriting rather than empowering it.
- It treats handwriting as separate from typed or dictated text.
This means that when you write or draw using ordinary digital ink, your content isn’t much more flexible than a scanned or static image. You might be able to copy it or move it around the page, but not much more.
The interactive ink difference
MyScript’s vision for digital ink goes way beyond emulating the look and feel of real ink on paper. With iink, we aim to:
- Fully integrate the natural advantages of writing and drawing by hand into the digital realm. You shouldn’t be forced to compromise creativity, memorization or learning just because you’re working on a digital device.
- Reduce the time and effort it takes to get ideas out of your head and into the digital world.
- Make your handwriting a star player in that digital world, as versatile and powerful as typed text.
A digital ink that goes further
iink exists at the intersection of AI and UX.
Advanced AI enables iink to read and interpret the intention behind your pen strokes. It can tell the difference between handwriting, drawing and pen gestures like underlining or scratching out to erase – all in real-time.
Meanwhile, UX informs how iink operates on the digital page. Our ongoing UX research program helps us to define the most natural editing gestures, the subtleties of user requirements across note-taking use-cases and much more besides. What’s more, we validate all our UX innovations in Nebo, our digital note-taking app. The result is that at the point of implementation, iink is always shaped by the needs and habits of users.
By combining AI and UX, we’ve developed a digital ink that can understand and empower even the untidiest scrawl in over 60 languages. Simply put, it’s the most advanced solution on the market.
iink is:
- Multimodal
There’s little point using digital devices to handwrite content if that content exists separately from other inputs, such as typed text. So we designed iink differently. It recognizes what you’re writing – interpreting characters, words and strokes in real-time. This empowers your handwriting to function just like typed or dictated text on the page – which means you can mix the different kinds of text in the same document, paragraph, sentence or even word. It’s all text to iink. And of course, you can convert handwriting to typed text as needed.
- Editable
We want writing and drawing with iink to feel as natural and intuitive as writing on paper – but with added digital performance. That means being able to use swift, simple pen gestures to erase, edit, emphasize and format in real-time, as well as to add or remove spaces or line breaks. And because iink is multimodal, our gestures work on both handwriting and typed text. In brief: iink makes digital handwriting as intuitive as writing on paper and as flexible as typing in a word processor app.
- Responsive
Key to bridging the divide between analog (paper) and digital (apps) is responsiveness. With iink, your handwriting reflows to accommodate edits as well as changes in layout and screen orientation; this is even true of mixed handwritten and typed content. For example, when you switch between devices, your text reflows instantly and automatically to remain well-ordered and readable on the new screen. This means you can access your notes across compatible tablets, smartphones and desktop computers without needing to manually adjust your view or reorder your content.
The digital ink of today and tomorrow
Once you see iink in action, you’ll understand why it’s the first choice of partners such as Rakuten Kobo, Huawei, Digital Engine and Smarttech.
iink offers greater flexibility, power and possibility from the very first stroke. It points to a future where handwritten and hand-drawn content is at the core of digital life: accessible, intelligent, intuitive and endlessly adaptable.
Sound good? We’ll meet you there.
The MyScript team.
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