The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted ordinary life into a digital platform. Individuals rapidly use digital or online media to avoid the impact of touch-based platforms. In this case, touchless technology is primarily used in operation theatres, online education systems, ticket counters, etc. However, the online numerals or characters written in the air are challenging to recognize efficiently due to the writing styles of every individual. Therefore, the present research focuses on recent work on online air-written handwritten recognition. Almost eighty-plus standard articles on handwriting recognition from various journal/conference databases are considered for the current review. In addition, the generalized methodology of handwriting recognition is also provided for new research. It is observed that some online handwritten databases for some languages are freely available for research purposes. However, the online real-time air-written numeral dataset is private for Devanagari and English. Therefore, designing and developing a standard dataset for character or numeral recognition written in the air is suggested. The earlier studies achieved satisfactory results on air-writing multilingual numerals collected via or without sensors using advanced machine learning and deep learning methods. The convolutional neural network (CNN) has provided the best accuracy for several languages, excluding Devanagari.