Confidence Property

Describes confidence and how it is used in recognition.

To obtain a level of confidence for each recognition result, you can get either the Confidence property of the RecognitionAlternate object or the Confidence property of the Gesture object. The confidence level is a number that indicates the degree of confidence for each alternate recognition result that the recognizer returns for a corresponding recognition segment.

Confidence is returned as low, average, or high. The application uses these results to:

• Indicate to the user that multiple possibilities exist.
• Rank the alternates by confidence level.

What Affects Confidence

Some of the things that make handwriting recognition difficult and affect confidence include:

• Difficulty determining word segmentation

• Case difficulties

• Uncommon writing styles
• Isolated punctuation

• Accented characters in English recognizers

Note: Confidence evaluation is available only for United States English and all gesture recognizers in this release. Methods that provide the confidence property for any other recognizer will return E_NOTIMPL.