I love products that bridge the virtual and physical. The product I want to highlight is the Neo Smartpen M1.
A classic dilemma for students taking notes is deciding whether to take notes by notebook or by laptop/tablet. With a notebook, one has the flexibility to easily add annotations, draw diagrams, and draw pictures relevant to the class (e.g. molecules in chemistry). With a laptop or tablet, one wields the capacity the do quick searches through notes, modify the structure and formatting after the fact to make things more organized, add information/pictures after the fact since the text can be moved around, and share with classmates conveniently.
The Neo Smartpen M1 isn’t the perfect solution, but it does a great job of bringing together the best of both worlds.
I’ll first illustrate what it can do and how it’s used. Then I’ll talk about which groups of users does it really appeal to and how it effectively addresses their needs. Lastly, I’ll talk about wherein lies its weaknesses, and how it could be improved.
Imagine this —
You’re sitting in a lecture hall and getting ready to take some good notes since you have an exam coming up next week. You take out your notebook and pen. They feel like a normal notebook and pen, simply using paper and ink, but they’re part of your Neo Smartpen M1 set. The professor starts the lecture, and you begin taking notes as you normally would. While this takes place, a virtual copy of your notes is being created in realtime via bluetooth connection from your pen to your phone’s Neo Smartpen app. This works through the tiny infrared camera embedded in the pen that’s establishing the position of your strokes by referring to the micro-markings on the paper (the paper doesn’t cost much more than normal paper and you can print it out yourself if you’d like). In addition, your professor’s voice is being recorded through the pen and being associated with the notes that you’re taking during that time frame.
You’re back in your room and ready to study for that exam. You open the Neo Smartpen application and open the virtual copy of your notebook. You’re able to search through your notes by term or topic since the app can recognize the words from the digital copy of your handwritten notes. When you forget the context for one of your bullet points, you listen to the audio recording corresponding to that section and are reminded of what your professor said. You’re ready for that exam, and get the A :)!
Two groups of people that can really benefit from this product are students and professionals in highly collaborative workspaces. First, I’ll speak about students.
In the student study flow with handwritten notes, I see three important pain points that this pen addresses.
- Students accumulate a lot of notes by the time it’s time for exams, and organizing those notes takes up precious study time.
- Note taking is an imperfect process. Often, things are missed. By the time a student is reviewing for an exam, he/she sometimes doesn’t remember the context for a bullet point written several weeks ago.
- Looking for specific pieces of information such as terms or topics is time consuming with paper notes.
The Neo Smartpen M1 addresses these issues with its feature that allows for the searching of specific words, its voice data feature which is constantly associating the voice recording with the notes the student is taking, and the fact that it helps the student keep notes organized from the beginning.
Next, I’ll talk about how this pen helps professionals in high collaboration workplaces.
Collaboration requires a ton of shared context and constant syncing/updating. Busy professionals should focus on the work at hand and not whether they remembered to update a colleague about a recent meeting.
Taking notes by laptop or tablet in workplaces has become predominant, but there still is a significant population that prefers to take notes by hand, especially in professions that may have an artistic component. Here are some challenges currently present for these individuals/workplaces:
- Forgot to scan & upload notes because of general busyness of day (e.g. back to back meetings)
- Scan, uploading, sending notes takes up precious work time.
- Archiving notes is generally good practice but people forget to do it.
The Neo Smartpen automatically creates a virtual copy of the notes, so the scanning step is entirely cut out. The app is integrated with services like email, so sending the notes out to the appropriate parties is made extremely simple. It’s also integrated with top cloud file drives like Google drive, and one can set it up such that notes are automatically being stored in the drive, so archiving doesn’t require any effort.
All in all, this pen system molds naturally into existing paradigms. It’s terribly difficult to change people’s behaviors, especially one like note taking. Many tablets designed specially for note taking and similar uses have a hard time gaining adoption because it requires a break from the years of habit and the individual ways people slowly developed their style of note taking. This smart pen enables people to continue their styles and habits with the power of technology behind them.
Though this product makes a strong case for why its useful, there are clear drawbacks of using this product. The most regrettable issue is one related to technical capacity. If your handwriting isn’t good, the transcription feature won’t work well and therefore affect the usefulness of the search feature. As machine learning models continue to improve in this space, I’m optimistic about the company’s ability to ameliorate this issue. Furthermore, I believe their mobile application could be greatly improved. Their pen is designed well and made to feel like a real pen, but the application is a bit clunky and doesn’t highlight the most important and most used features.
Outside of specific UI changes, I have a few broader ideas about how the product can be improved both on a feature level and on a grander moon-shot level.
For the feature level improvements, I believe the application can take greater advantage of the fact that they can process the handwritten notes to extract the text and use that ability to address specific impactful use cases for some of its core users. For instance, for students, the processing should be able to break down their handwritten notes in more ways. In notes, words are often circled, underline, or capitalized to provide signals for relative importance. There’s often structure to notes such as having some main point and then bullet points below that point. The application should be able to capture this structure and meta-information and present this in an useful form for the user. For instance, it’d be very helpful to get a collection of every term you circled in your notes. Or to get a set of all the main topics that can expand into the bullet points when clicked on. Or get the words that were completely capitalized. Although processing handwritten notes is by no means an easy task, the company has made it one of its core strengths and value-adders, so I believe continued investment in this area will be aligned with their priorities. Also, my suggestions for additional processing such as identifying underlined words is hard, but definitely not too big of stretch.
For more ambitious moon-shot ideas, I’d like to present this Smartpen system as a paper-as-an-interface framework. Essentially, people are interacting with a digital system through paper, and I believe this has uses outside of the domains Neo Smartpen currently seems to focus in. As an example, imagine a restaurant in which each table has a small sheet of paper on the side. Whenever, you need something from the waiting staff such as a cup of water, you could just jot down, “water please” on the paper with the provided Smartpen, and the waiter will be notified of that request. Another area of use for this kind of interface are in clinics and hospitals. When signing in to see a doctor or nurse, paper forms are often used. For record keeping, it’s helpful to keep a copy digitally but that’d require scanning or manual input. If patients filled out forms with the Smartpen system, that data to be automatically stored digitally. Alternatives to paper in this scenario would be tablets, however, tablets are more expensive and difficult for the elderly to use. They also pose more security risks since tablets were built for more than just collecting written data and malicious software can be installed. Ideas in this paper-as-an-interface category would require the product to be cheaper (currently pens of this kind range from $80–$200), but the scale involved with using this system as an interface may also drive costs down. In sum, this concept is a stretch and needs more exploration, but the impact could potentially be big.
To conclude, I believe that this product was not only designed well, but pushes our thinking in how technology can tie the physical and virtual. It represents the kind of technology that doesn’t interfere with our existing habits and behaviors, but enhances them. Thanks for reading!
