Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. I think even the creator of 2001′s HAL 9000 would have been impressed by the new Livescribe Echo 4GB smart pen I’ve been testing. I’m sure he’d have enjoyed being able to email people pages from his handwritten notebooks — you just write email at the top of the page — doing complex calculations by tapping printed numbers, playing tunes on a hand-drawn piano, or running a pen-based app such as Blackjack ($1.99) or The American Heritage English Dictionary ($9.99). Instead of, The 1945 Proposal by Arthur C. Clarke, writing to Wireless World, Arthur could have explained his idea for geostationary satellites by adding voice annotations to his diagrams and publishing the resulting PDF file online as a “pencast” like Livescribe-Connect-Pencast. It’s not magic, but it does feel magical, and a toddler could do it.
If you’re a student, journalist, designer, business executive or almost any sort of scientist, it’s useful to be able to computerise your notebooks and make your handwriting searchable. The ability to synchronise voice recording with handwriting, so that you can record lectures and talks alongside your notes, now takes that idea to the next level. While it isn’t unique — you’ve long been able to sync handwriting and recordings in Microsoft’s OneNote on a Windows Tablet PC — Livescribe lets you work anywhere with just a ballpoint pen and paper. You don’t need to carry a laptop PC or tablet around, or write uncomfortably on a digitising screen. All you have to do is dock the smartpen later. This copies all your files across automatically, and recharges the battery.
There are, of course, drawbacks. First, the Echo is bulky for a ballpoint, because it also packs in a high-speed infrared camera, a voice recorder with microphone and speaker, a one-line OLED screen display, a micro USB port, and the tiny ARM 9-based computer that makes everything tick. But still, it’s not too heavy at 36 grams (1.3oz), and you quickly forget the bulk once you start using it. If you avoid actions where the pen talks to you in its American accent, other people might not notice it either.
But if you are the sort of stationery junky who thinks a Pilot G2 or G-Tec-C Ultra Fine defines the minimum level acceptable, the Livescribe ballpoint will come as a terrible disappointment.
Second, Livescribe pens only work with special paper, of the sort developed for the Anoto system. The paper is covered with microdots, so the infrared camera can track the pen’s movements, and also includes printed controls that you can tap to do things like start and stop recording. You can buy a variety of notebooks including black Moleskine-style journals, but you can’t use cheap spiral-bound reporters’ notebooks or familiar items of office stationary such as agendas and cash ledgers. However, if you have a PostScript-compatible 600dpi colour laser, you can print your own Livescribe paper.
Getting notes onto your Windows PC or Mac is painless. You have to install the Livescribe desktop and register the pen, but after that, it’s just a case of plugging it into a USB port using the cable provided. The software can handle four notebooks at once, and now features “connectors”. These let you drag-and-drop selected pages into email, Google Docs, Evernote, Facebook or MyLivescribe account, which is your free Livescribe storage in “the cloud”.
Converting handwritten notes into text requires an extra program: MyScript, from Vision Objects. This costs $29.95 after a 30-day free trial. Just select one or more documents in the Livescribe desktop and choose “send to MyScript”. The program converts handwriting to text before sending the results to Microsoft Word, where you can use the spell-check to clean them up.
I’ve found handwriting recognition a perennial disappointment, but MyScript is impressive. It works almost perfectly if you write carefully or use block caps, which you’d expect. However, it could sometimes read my usual “speed scrawl” better than I could, which was a surprise. (The full MyScript Studio allows you to train the application, and presumably works even better.) If you use a Livescribe pen, you will try to write more carefully, and you might miss a few things in a lecture or interview. Fortunately, this doesn’t matter because now you have a voice recording! You can fill in the blanks later.
The third drawback is the price, which is based on storage. A 2GB Echo Smartpen costs £99.99, which goes up to £149.99 for 4GB and £179.99 for 8GB. Recording time is about 100 hours per gigabyte. That’s a lot of meetings, or lectures, for something that fits a shirt pocket.
