PUNE, July 22: All those gloating over their typing skills on personal computers can take a breather. It might not be too long before you find yourself feeding handwritten data straight into the computer, which, for its part, might actually reprimand you for incorrect alphabet formation!

If it sounds too far-fetched, a visit to the Centre for Information Technology (C-IT) -- a joint venture of the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and the University of Pune -- will set all doubts at rest.

For the uninitiated, while conventional data entry processes 1000-odd pages a day, use of the hi-tech Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) technology increases the speed by five times.

But the best part is that the data is now available in databases in electronic form.

The conversion of data from paper and the manual feeding which proved to be a bottleneck especially where there was a large customer base can now be made faster as a `short-cut' to the keying-in process has been successfully developed by C-DAC and C-IT.

In fact, large organisations like universities or State Government departments, the Income Tax department and even the internal banking system can make good use of the wide-ranging applications of this technology, says Rajeevlochan Phadke, member of the technical group at C-IT.

Demonstrating how the ICR technology operates, Phadke pointed out that with the help of a scanner, a digitised image of the data is stored in the computer, doing away with the data entry operator which has to keep dividing his attention between the paper, the computer monitor and at times, the keyboard.

Recognising `machine print' is relatively easy for the computer, but here it has to account for the variations in the handwritten characters and the medium used for writing, whether a ballpoint pen or a micro-tip pen.

The second procedure would have to consider various factors including the pronounced `accent' of one's basic script in his/her writing.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.