What would perhaps be a worthwhile feature is the ability to input already known unicode names into a text box after seeing the results, to feed the database with more useful matches.
For example, tried drawing a somewhat joined 'TM' a couple times but no matches for 'Trademark symbol', however a way to manually input that unicode/name might provide the database with a positive match for the next user trying to find it.
They didn't think to weight the prior probabilities by usage frequency* - drawing a reasonable ? gives me ȓ, ᕉ, ╔, ᣑ, Ѓ, ק, ᒌ, ŕ, ᒤ, ᒦ, ņ, ᒯ, ѓ, and finally ?.
I'm also guessing that they're directly comparing the handwritten character to some version of the unicode character rather than with human attempts to draw the character. Human drawings are often quite different (more slanted, stylised etc.) than typeface characters. This is much more forgiveable though because assembling a good dataset for human drawn characters is hard (especially for any reasonable chunk of the unicode set).
(*this is fairly easy to do: just find some large source of typical unicode, like Wikipedia in all languages, and index them).
>They didn't think to weight the prior probabilities by usage frequency
I don't know if that is the right metric for this sort of tool. I'd guess the use case is for trying to find infrequently encountered characters. It should probably try to detect your current locale, and then say eliminate all ASCII characters when you are suspected of speaking English, etc., since you are already aware of how to type a question mark.
Yeah, it seems like they're taking the drawing and matching the edges and points up with edges and points in a font file. Hopefully they'll start weighing by frequency and add more glyphs soon!
Forgot to mention, I use this bookmarklet with amp-what to change the font to Segoe UI Symbol as that often has more Unicode symbols and is the font used in a lot of the places I tend to use unicode symbols.
An interesting side effect of this is that it shows once again why (naive implementations of) international domain names presented such a large security risk. Just draw an "A" and look at the results...
It seems (and is logical, I suppose) that you have to match the symbol pretty closely to get what you're looking for. I drew a car twice, the first time getting absolutely nothing relevant, and the second time -- trying to be more precise and using all the space available -- got automobile, taxi, bus, etc, etc.
edit: The primary problem here, I mean, is that if you don't know what the symbol looks like and want to see if it exists, you might not get hits the first time you try to draw, but it might not actually exist anyway.
It doesn't support every unicode character yet, but it's getting there. For example, it recognized the Kannada character ttha (ಠ), but it doesn't know the poop (💩) character.
Did you ever get it to recognize the snowman? That's my go-to also. I've tried two snowballs, three snowballs, with and without arms, with and without stars, with and without hat... and all I keep getting is tongue. I am pretty bad at drawing though.
I've often thought that the best way to get access to the richness of Unicode would be a drawing pad, perhaps as part of the keyboard, or as an on-screen area, for use with a mouse. Character maps just seem clumsy to me.
For fun, I tried Eth ð, Thorn þ, and Hungarian ű, all of which it got, but not as the first choice. It did not find the Ing rune, which looks a bit like a < and > combined.
Oh wow, the drawing mechanism is really satisfying.
Too bad about not supporting 漢字. The only half-decent IME pad is on Windows. Online ones (kanji.sljfaq.org) and Xorg ones (ibus-mozc) are just horrendously bad at detection. I usually have to resort to multi-radical lookups.
(Late response, sorry.) It may not be proper to say this, but if you look at 加, to me it's clearly the 力 radical + the 口 radical. I know that officially it's classified under 力. wwwjdic has a tool based around my observation, called multi-radical lookup: http://www.edrdg.org/cgi-bin/wwwjdic/wwwjdic?1R
Sometimes it won't include one of the radicals that are clearly there, though. But this tool is frequently helpful to me when IME pads fail me, and stroke counts are fuzzy.
(Late response, sorry.) Seems focused on Chinese, but Han unification means it's still somewhat useful. The drawing feels clunky and I see both my mouse cursor and their custom pen cursor at the same time. The drawing window is rather small. Prediction seems worse than Windows IME, but better than mozc IME.
This is pretty cool. I expect that even if the code is open source, that the real value is in the dataset used. Does anyone know the licensing information ?
For example, tried drawing a somewhat joined 'TM' a couple times but no matches for 'Trademark symbol', however a way to manually input that unicode/name might provide the database with a positive match for the next user trying to find it.