News

Tablets get more languages: huge download!

There are now nine hand-writing recognition engines you can add to your Tablet PC, and four new speech-recognition packages - and you can download them from Microsoft.

Actually, saying you can download the update is somewhat misleading - it's a trivial 258 megabytes!

The alternative is to sign up and pay $15 for a (free) CD in the post. The form insists on your phone number but fear not! - the clever programmers have arranged things so that you can't enter a valid UK phone number, even if you register yourself as being in the UK.

"Installing the Recognizer Pack on a Tablet PC gives a user the ability to convert handwriting and speech in multiple languages from digital ink and speech to typed text on a single PC," says the blurb. For instance, if both German and French recognisers are installed on a Tablet PC, digital ink written in both German and French can be converted into typed text with greater accuracy.

Besides providing additional recognisers to Tablet PC customers, the Recognizer Pack updates the Tablet Input Panel, allowing users to select any Windows input language keyboard. This gives users access to the correct soft keyboard for the input language selected.

These language recognisers are included in the Tablet PC Recognizer Pack:

Handwriting recognisers: UK English, U.S. English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese Speech recognisers: English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese.

Full information from Microsoft itself.