TEL AVIV, Israel - May 11, 2006 (UPI) -- Four years after arriving on the market, Microsoft's Tablet PC will support Hebrew language handwriting in 2007, the company announced Wednesday.
The software giant said it was translating its program Windows Vista: Tablet PC Edition into Hebrew as well and that a team of developers was working on the Hebrew version, according to a report on the Hebrew news Web site Ynet.
The team of developers and Microsoft Israel's manager of localization, Shmuel Yair, were on hand at the Tech Ed 2006 conference in the southern city of Eilat this week to begin collecting Hebrew handwriting samples. According to the report, the researchers collected 200 samples at the conference.
At the moment, Tablet PC sales aren't high in Israel, the news site said. Yair told the news site he hoped that the language upgrade would also improve sales.
Training the computer to recognize handwriting in a language also means introducing the computer to the local lexicon, including common first and last names and names of places, the news site said.
Copyright 2006 by United Press International
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