How to Write 225 Words Per Minute <em>With a Pen</em>
As a journalist, I begin most interviews by holding up my pen and asking, “Have you ever seen one of these?” No one ever has.
It’s not an ordinary pen, of course. It’s a Sky wifi smartpen, a piece of gee-whiz technology from a company called Livescribe. Basically, the smartpen replaces all your standard reporter’s tools. To start with, it’s an old-fashioned pen for old-fashioned paper, so I can still scribble my notes the way I always have. The smartpen is also a high-quality digital recorder, creating an audio file of the interview as we go along. Finally, a tiny camera near the tip of the pen simultaneously takes pictures of my notes as I write.
All of that information is then pulled together by a microprocessor housed in the barrel of the pen. And because the smartpen is really a computer, it’s able to sync up the picture of my handwritten notes with the audio file. That means I can tap the tip of the pen anywhere in my notebook, and the pen will instantly replay the audio of whatever was being said when I took that note. And since it’s WiFi enabled, the whole interview—audio file, notes, and all—is automatically uploaded to my Evernote account. It’s a little like magic.
There’s one other feature I like to point out. It’s possible, I tell people, to get optical character recognition software to go with the pen. If you write like a normal person, the OCR will automatically convert your handwritten notes into a.
