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As many Microsoft fans wait to see the company jumping into the wearables space, the Redmond giant is instead busy creating innovative apps for Android Wear. After releasing the OneNote app for Android Wear, Microsoft Research has come out with a neat keyboard app, very unlike anything we have seen till now.
Most of you would agree how lame and unintuitive it is to type on a smartwatch, so the viable alternative is voice input. But then, that’s not a feasible solution for many cases (like in meetings, thick accents etc), so Microsoft has released an analog keyboard which lets you enter text by drawing handwritten letters on a smartwatch screen. The keyboard supports square screens with a 320 x 320 resolution and the Moto 360, and you’re able to draw letters, special characters and numbers freely.
Google hasn’t built a keyboard app itself for Android Wear as it thinks that voice input should suffice for most people, but there could be a niche market for this, like what Minuum is trying to do. Microsoft is seemingly utilizing its OCR expertise over here. The video below shows how it works. Though we would reserve the judgment till we try this ourselves, the demo from Verge does look pretty neat for a v1 app.
Willing to give it a try? You can go ahead and download the app from here. Make sure you follow the instructions closely to get started.
