HANDWRITTEN notes can be a joy to receive, but a real chore to send. There's the search for a stamp, the trip to the mailbox, and the pain of attempting joined-up writing with fingers more used to texting.
Enter a handful of start-ups that make robots do the chore for you. For a fee, a machine holding an ordinary pen will ink out your message – sent via an app – in a deceptively human hand, even varying the size and shapes of characters for added realism.
"We're not trying to fool people into believing that someone wrote the note for them," says Sonny Caberwal, founder of Bond, a New York City handwriting service that launched in November. "We're trying to give people a tool to express themselves in the way they want."
The handwriting robots are a high-tech update to the autopen machines that recreate multiple signatures on diplomas or politicians' letters. New software lets the robot mimic the different characteristics of a person's handwriting, like the way we join up our letters. Though the bots don't write much faster than an actual person, they can work for long hours without getting tired or making mistakes.
Customers can choose from a number of preset fonts, designed to look messy, stylish, or formal. Or for $199, Bond will mimic a customer's own handwriting, and for $499 they will invite you to work with handwriting experts for a day to improve it first. Bond also offers options based on the handwriting of famous people such as Sigmund Freud.
You can also use the services to send thank-you cards, holiday greetings and birthday cards. The robots could be a handy way for firms to communicate with customers: marketing research suggests that people are more likely to open handwritten letters. MailLift in Austin, Texas, and Handiemail in Chicago already hire humans for this task.
"There's a certain sentimental nature that goes along with receiving an actual note," says David Wachs, who founded the app Handwrytten when he got fed up writing thank-you notes after business meetings.
Etiquette expert Jodi R. R. Smith of US firm Mannersmith says she loves the idea. "Anything that helps people to be more polite and more thoughtful is a wonderful technology."
This article appeared in print under the headline "No time to write? Get letters crafted by bots"
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