Like many other tech enthusiasts, I am a big fan of Moleskine notebooks & diaries. I decided to write each sentence of this article on a new page of my pocket size, yellow note book. For the sake of saving some very small trees, I will try to keep this article short. I think it will be very interesting to see how long it takes to type up each page. We will calculate the average time taken, per word & per character, to type (capture) this content. Each participant will type up each handwritten page so that we have a bit more data to assess time and quality.

Each sentence was hand-written on a separate page.

Results

The above text was typed up into a form on a mobile phone by three of the participants. There were a few minor errors (double spaces and some miss-typed characters) but the quality was decent. At least one of the three participants got each of the sentences correct without errors.

There were 8 sentences including the title with a total of 145 words or 777 characters (with spaces). It took participants just over 12 minutes on average to complete the 8 tasks. The average speed for the tasks was therefore between 12 and 13 words per minute (WPM).

One study of average computer users, the average rate for transcription was 33 words per minute, and only 19 words per minute for composition. In the same study, when the group was divided into “fast”, “moderate” and “slow” groups, the average speeds were 40 wpm, 35 wpm, and 23 wpm respectively. Wikipedia

This result (in terms of typing speed) is not very impressive (almost half the speed of a ’slow’ typist) but we have to consider a few points.

• Participants had to capture META data about the task (the task number) and read an instruction about the task for each sentence. These steps could be avoided.
• The form used to capture the text did not make use of predictive text. Predictive text could definitely improve typing speed.
• The convenience of being able to type on your phone while you are travelling on public transport, walking, lying in bed etc. must definitely be taken into account in comparing typing on a personal computer to typing on a mobile phone.
• The types of HCR tasks we have been discussing do not involve typing up long documents, but rather short strings of text like those used by Recaptcha.

In summary, the accuracy was pretty good but I had hoped that the speed would have been better. We will have to conduct some further testing in this regard if we seriously consider targeting Human Character Recognition (HCR) as a business service to offer through Mobenzi. This is just one of many applications.