Applications and ethics of a voice-activated robot that writes in a user's own handwriting

Abstract

For people who have lost the ability to write by hand, an automated hands-free device that writes a letter or note in their handwriting can help them reclaim the skill. In this study, we design a system to scan text from handwriting samples and generate a handwriting style. The system takes a voice input of a prompt for a letter to be written and feeds it to a Large Language Model (LLM) to compose a letter iteratively with the user until the user is satisfied. The system then writes that letter in the user’s handwriting on a sheet of paper via the AxiDraw V3 robot. The system was successfully able to mimic human handwriting – in some cases evaluators confused handwriting written by the machine and human handwriting. The system also accurately reproduced different handwriting styles and improved the accuracy of characters in a letter using a novel Character Refinement algorithm. This study is unique in considering some of the thorny ethical questions that come with such a device. Given the unique risks of using the robot for forgery, we implement authentication through voice print and a spoken password.