Inputting Chinese into computers presents many challenges not present in English and other Western languages. Chinese has many thousands of characters and putting them on a keyboard would be unwieldy. Many keyboard based systems have the user type in some representation of the character, based on the character's pronounciation or the way it is written, and then present a selection of matching characters for the user to select from. More intelligent systems take into account context to help select the right character for user. These keyboard systems often take some training though to become proficient. Much easier would be to either speak to the computer or to write the characters on a pad like they are written on paper. Problems with these approaches lie in the difficulty in getting high accuracy. Speech systems must deal with the various accents common to China and pen-based systems must handle the use variety in handwriting styles. Disadvantages also include the need to buy additional hardware such as a microphone or pen pad. Still, companies are constantly improving these types of systems and many computers now come with microphones. Finally, for already written or printed text, many companies offer optical character recognition products. The document is scanned into the computers memory and the software then attempts to convert the picture into an editable Chinese text. |