Handwriting robots

Clive Thompson writes about the newest innovation in junk mail marketing: handwriting robots. That’s right, robots can write letters in longhand with real ballpoint pens and you can’t really tell unless you know what to look for. Here’s a demonstration:

But it turns out that marketers are working diligently to develop forms of mass-generated mail that appear to have been patiently and lovingly hand-written by actual humans. They’re using handwriting robots that wield real pens on paper. These machines cost up to five figures, but produce letters that seem far more “human”. (You can see one of the robots in action in the video adjacent.) This type of robot is likely what penned the address on the junk-mail envelope that fooled me. I saw ink on paper, subconsciously intuited that it had come from a human (because hey, no laser-printing!) and opened it.

Handwriting, it seems, is the next Turing Test.

There is also a company that provided handwritten letters for sale professionals and I don’t know if that or the robot letters are more unusual.

• Clive Thompson
• robots
• video