A handwritten page is ink, and ink cannot be searched. So Grape reads the words off each page on the device itself and keeps them next to the note, where search, the note list and the AI can use them. Nothing is sent anywhere to do it.
When it happens
A few seconds after you stop writing, the page you were on is read. It waits for the pencil to lift, so recognition never gets in the way of a stroke. The words then show up as the note's preview in the list, in search, in the word count in note info and in what the AI sees.
Recognition is on by default and has a switch of its own, Recognize handwriting, in Settings under Notes and in the notebook's menu. It is a per device setting: a long page costs a short pause, and one device can opt out without the others following.
Across devices
The words a phone or an iPad reads travel with the note, so a notebook written on the iPad is searchable on the desktop as soon as sync has run. Each device prefers its own reading when it has one, so a page rewritten on the phone is read again there rather than kept as the iPad last saw it.
The desktop app has no recognizer. A notebook that has only ever been written on there has no words until a phone or an iPad opens it, and until then search finds it by its name alone.
Asking the AI
The AI chat reads a notebook as the words that were recognized off its pages, page count included, and answers from them like any other note. Ask what you wrote in a lecture and the answer comes from the ink.
The AI never writes into a notebook. Rewriting a page would mean throwing the ink away, so when you ask it to summarise, tidy or expand a handwritten note it puts the result in a new typed note and links the two. It cannot create a handwriting note either; that is done from the new note button.
Limits
- Handwriting on iPhone and iPad is read with the system's own recognition and is good at ordinary handwriting. On Android the recognizer is trained on printed text, so neat print reads well and cursive less so.
- The printed text of an imported PDF is not read, only the ink written over it. Your annotations are searchable, the slide underneath is not.
- A page that has just been rewritten is read again a few seconds later, so a search a moment after writing may show the previous words.