Yesterday I downloaded iPadOS 14 and wanted to test the new Scribble-feature that converts handwritten text to, you know, text. And so I’m writing this post (mostly) using my Apple Pencil and I have to admit that I’m a bit impressed. It works pretty well-ish. So far I’ve used an app called Good Notes to take handwritten notes, but there was no way to use the Pencil to enter text into textfields.

Although it’s nice at first glance, I’m annoyed by a couple of things:

• The screen that introduces this feature is a mix of German and English as you can see in the screenshot I attached. I use my iPad in German and this might look like a minor detail, but to me, this is an important one. In my mind either nobody cared or QA failed and both cases make me a bit sad. Hopefully this feature is available for German, too. I will test it immediately 🤓
• The second thing is that the underlying machine learning doesn’t recognize some characters correctly or at all, yet. 1 and I are just one example, special characters are another. Maybe this improves over time?
• When something goes wrong, like when a typo appears or so, I don’t know how to fix the error easily using the Pencil. I know that I can strike a word or whole paragraph to remove it but when it comes to changing just one letter, using the keyboard is far more convenient — and faster. Sometimes the text gets selected instead of being removed, this is another annoyance.

In conclusion I’d really like to like Scribble and maybe I should just give it a chance? If it fails the test of time I still can go back to my beloved keyboard.

Edit: I just found out, that English and Mandarin are the only supported languages at the moment. Hopefully this changes in the near future as I really like this feature! Reading a book and scribbling notes in there is just great!