Never would I have guessed that a presentation on the architecture of handwriting recognition systems would be a source of great hilarity. At the Microsoft Mobile Platforms Division Partner Briefing, Jay Pittman has us rolling in the aisles. Some examples.

"So you write 'dictionary', but the recognizer comes up with 'dictum'. So we let the user select the 'um' and rewrite it. But we have to do that in context of the first part. Otherwise, Bill Gates tries this, and he writes 'ionary', and the system looks it up in the dictionary and finds the first matching word, 'ion'. And then Bill Gates uses... 'colorful' language."

"I never imagined when I was planning my career that some day Bill Gates would pay me to look up dirty words in the dictionary."

"So we have to mark certain words as being in the dictionary, but being 'restricted'. That means that, when the recognizer can't recognize something but the F-word looks like a possible match, we still don't put it in the match list. We have to put it in the dictionary, or else when someone types it, it will show up as a misspelling. Then someone will write a letter to the editor: 'Microsoft doesn't know the F-word.' But that doesn't mean they want it showing up in the suggested word list. That way, we'll get letters from Senators. Or Archbishops. (Audience laughs.) It has happened."

"KKOMO: That means 'Krispy Kreme's Outside My Office'. It makes you very popular here at Microsoft."

"We don't pre-announce things... usually because we don't know!"

Mr. Pittman is one funny speaker!

On a more serious, business note: at this briefing, Microsoft announced that the Richard Hale Shaw Group is now their official partner for developer training for enterprise Tablet customers. If you're not quite large enough to be one of their enterprise customers, you can get the same training directly from us.

UPDATE: "We also get asked about Klingon text recognition. The answer's still no."

UPDATE: Fixed a dumb spelling error.