18 ms·
Ask HN: How to transcribe 1000s of handwritten notes
I have 10 years’ worth of journals.
My handwriting is not great!
None of the off the shelf solutions come even close to recognizing my handwriting.
Can you think of anything better than just opening every single file and manually transcribing it?
I have been thinking about training a model to first divide the images into lines of text. Then, it will be easier to transcribe, and automatically those transcriptions will be associated with areas of the image, in case I figure out a good handwriting model.
- f_k 2y agoShameless plug: https://getsearchablepdf.com https://getsearchablepdf.com There's a free trial so you can check if it works for your handwriting.
- chaos_emergent 2y agohave you tried using gpt-4o? It's pretty incredible at recognizing handwriting.
- wriggler 2y agoHave you tried https://www.handwritingOCR.com https://www.handwritingOCR.com? It is designed to do exactly what you are looking for, and has been used very successfully by many others for that same purpose (I’m the founder). It is not as cheap per page as Google Document AI, for example, but it does tend to be much more accurate for handwriting, so usually ends up cheaper when editing time is factored in. If you find it does work well with your handwriting, please get in touch and I can try to fit the pricing to your use case.
- kwanbix 2y agoSounds super cool, but why "per month" and not some "per page" pricing?
- wriggler 2y agoThanks! I’m still experimenting with pricing, and agree that per page pricing makes logical sense. Still, it’s harder for me to build a sustainable business on that model. I will probably test a few per-page or single payment options soon, though.
- fragmede 2y agopeople don't want yet another monthly subscription so that's going to be a harder sell. even though the business advice is that monthly subscriptions are better for you, the business owner, you can't forget about your customer. who wants to setup a subscription for something they think they're only going to use once or twice? and then have to go through the bullshit of cancelling.
- wriggler 2y agoTrue, in cases like OP a one-off purchase will be better. But I also have business customers with regular and ongoing document processing needs for whom a subscription does work. I expect the answer may be a combination of the two.
- EasyMark 2y agoWhy not do both? That way you can capture both types of customers. Even if you do subscription model people are gonna sign up for a month and then ditch it. Most people don’t need this service “constantly” so per page seems ideal for one type of customer and subscription for another who would need it for a long time, but you may want to put a hard limit on that too, as a summer interned high school student or college student could do a lot of damage for a law operation needing such a service :D
- wriggler 2y agoThanks, I'm grateful for this useful feedback.
- Cort3z 2y agoMy 2 cents ; let people buy packs of Scans. Say 100, 200, and 1000. Rarely people will have exact match with their work, so they are left with some pages "left over", which can nudge them back into using the product more often to "use up" what they paid for. With this strategy you might be more successful in making a workflow out of it, and nudge people over to a monthly model. Just don't make the packs so small that they can be aligned with their normal workflows, eg. Transcribing a 40 page note book. I would advise to do some statistics to see how many pages people typically scan at the same-ish time. Also: it is considered good practice to indicate that you are affiliated when promoting a product
- bckr 2y agoWill try the free trial this week, thank you. I don’t see a way to fine tune on here, though. Is that right or am I missing it?
- menomatter 2y agoDoes it work for Arabic and hebrew? I am trying to teach myself how to fine tune a model and thought doing this with my own arabic notes could be a fun project. Not sure where to start though. update: I tired it and it works to some degree and a lot better than chatgpt.
- hamishleahy 2y agoTry using the RATH analyser from github
- elena567 2y ago[flagged]
- freddealmeida 2y agoI built this firm a decade ago. https://www.cogent.co.jp/en/ https://www.cogent.co.jp/en/ Works with English and Japanese. Sadly I'm no longer with the team there but the work is solid. Try it out.
- ZunarJ5 2y agoArchaeologist tool, you'll want to fine tune it for yourself. https://readcoop.eu/transkribus/ https://readcoop.eu/transkribus/
- tcsenpai 2y agoTheoretical solution: train a model on your handwriting. There should be plenty of easy (relatively) to use apps and frameworks for that. It will take time but you will have a pretty tailored solution. Also of course: first of all try to process the images so that they only are white and black (not greyscale, actual B/W pictures)
- bcrl 2y agoAmazon's Textract seems to do a decent job on my horrific scribbles, and is far better than any of the open source OCR tools I tried. To get started quickly, try using Textractor: https://github.com/Artikash/Textractor https://github.com/Artikash/Textractor
- bckr 2y agoThanks, I recall trying this one too, but wasn’t aware of that repo
- _f9cu 2y agoI have my 3 years of paper, I wanted to use it to experiment building a black mass program. A blackmass program is a concept which will yield to a black mass in the computer, capable of building conceptual cool tech like automating your daily work, self experimentation, self learning etc. My notes will have instructions to reach the black mass state, a computer image scanner will try to learn my handwritings, take them as instructions, connect dots etc. The design of this system is cryptic and challenging. because, side effect to create a computational program will result in a circling thoughts for me. And its hard for me to convert it into an action. Taking that as an inspiration, this program is a circling program, which means, it will constantly spiral upwards in a value that is definitive to its actions in the past. All my notes has information or points or ideas about this fictional concept. I burned the notes which were repetitive, kept the rest. When I did that, It created more head space for me. The headspace, helped to solve problems and have more space for more learnings.
- bckr 2y ago> I burned the notes which were repetitive, kept the rest. > When I did that, It created more head space for me. This is essentially the idea behind Getting Things Done and Building a Second Brain As I said to another commenter, I’ve been able to separate out the project notes and ideas from my autobiographical diaries. These latter I want to keep and read. Thanks for your interesting comment and good luck building your system!
- 65 2y agoAWS Textract has worked better for me than the other cloud OCR solutions.
- hm-nah 2y agoI’ve had good success with: 1. Scan them (or take photos of each page) 2. put them files in a directory 3. Make a Python script that sends them to OpenAI GOT-4o 4. Store the text as a new file in the directory.
- spaceship__sun 2y agoHeard of GCP Document AI? And if you're rich, use gpt4o.
- kernelRiot 2y ago[dead]
- llama_person 2y agoIf you have access to a GPU, try a vision-language model using Ollama, and feed it your notes. Might work out!
- scovetta 2y agoTake photos of them, or cut the binding and scan them all, and then feed the work out to mechanical turk?
- jhayward 2y agoThis is likely the fastest and cheapest option. Pennies per page. Double- or triple- assign them when they show signs of large differences between expected grammar, word choice, or spelling patterns.
- chrisjj 2y agoOr avoid cutting by using a book scanner e.g. https://www.amazon.co.uk/CZUR-Professional-Document-Auto-Flatten-Languages/dp/B0BM92YPHW/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/CZUR-Professional-Document-Auto-Fla...
- yosito 2y agoPay someone on Upwork or Fiver to transcribe them for you.
- wilabroard 2y agoFor anyone whose handwritten notes have equations or pictures, Mathpix is stellar. Their APIs can take PDFs as input and return markdown with latex and embedded images. The handwriting recognition is pretty good on my cursive -- good enough anyway that a plain old LLM like Llama 3 can fix the typos. (Likely under the hood Mathpix has done exactly what you're proposing, with image segmentation, text/image/math classification, then transcription.) I've been using an Apple Shortcuts automation that turns my handwritten PDFs into notes in Obsidian, with the transcription up top and the PDF embedded below. Could pretty easily be adapted to turn a library of PDFs into a folder of Obsidian markdown notes. Here's a writeup: https://riddle.press/a-marriage-between-handwritten-notes-and-obsidian/ https://riddle.press/a-marriage-between-handwritten-notes-an...
- pcherna 2y agoI have a hundred or so pages of handwritten letters in Hungarian, but got useless results from AWS Textract and from transkribus. However, I also have about the same number of pages (written by the same person) that I have already gotten hand-transcribed into Hungarian. How might I approach using the already-transcribed stuff to train some kind of AI model or text-recognition model to work on the rest?
- meristohm 2y agoWhy do you want to transcribe the journals?
- bckr 2y agoThat’s a great question. 1) I want to have a more-readable version of my autobiographical info. I frequently write things down about my psychology that I specifically want to reflect on later. 2) I want to have a system that can read my handwriting. This is a ton of historical data that I’d love to label.
- radiantspace 2y agoIf you use Telegram, you can just voice message those to https://t.me/gienjibot https://t.me/gienjibot, it uses OpenAI's Whisper under the hood, so recognition is superb and also you can immediately fix grammar with it. And yes, i'm both the creator of the tool and the happy user.
- ant6n 2y agoScan into pdf and organize them, keep as PDF. You have to think about what your goal is. Handwritten notes can be perfectly digitized into handwritten notes. What do you need the ocr for? Publishing? … transcribe what you need, or better, rewrite. Searching? As you scan, make a basic index so that you can refer to the notes. Organize the folders properly with your notes, use a useful naming scheme.
- jyriand 2y agoHave you tried Appke notes. It does a pretty decent job. Here is a example https://youtu.be/eoIIUpdhKZs?si=PXWdhTt0DmFjbrLs https://youtu.be/eoIIUpdhKZs?si=PXWdhTt0DmFjbrLs
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- simonw 2y agoI'll throw in another vote for AWS Textract, I've had great results for it against 19th century handwriting: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Aug/25/sfms-archive/ https://simonwillison.net/2022/Aug/25/sfms-archive/
- 1970-01-01 2y agoI would approach it like this: how long does it take to type out one journal? How long does it take to research, trial, config, use, retweak, retry, and finally confirm one of a half dozen OCR solutions? Will your chosen solution(s) be available for another 10 years? I'm sorry but the type it out solution seems the the best choice. You will probably remember something interesting by doing it that way.
- IanCal 2y agoA really important question here is why? That will guide what's important. Inaccuracies aren't as much of a problem if you're using it as a search index where you'll return the image of your writing.
- kjfarm 2y agoI've been playing with https://huggingface.co/microsoft/trocr-base-handwritten https://huggingface.co/microsoft/trocr-base-handwritten which has been pretty good so far. I want to take it and fine-tune on my own handwriting. For equations, I either use mathpix or just type them manually.
- angra_mainyu 2y agoJust scan them over the course of a few months, spending a couple of hours a day. If your notes are anything like mine there might be arrows, drawings or text effects like underlines and circling of words that you'd want to conserve. You can later ocr the whole thing.
- Parrot9141 2y agoI have a similar situation (especially when it comes to the handwriting) and am now trying to train my own tesseract model, which with around 12 pages of manually transcribed content starts to work.
- constantinum 2y agoI'm unsure how recognisable your handwriting is, but the following tech understood mine. Try LLMwhisperer[1] pdf extraction API. You are only one "curl" command away from extracting your handwritten text. The best thing is it preserves the layout of your notes, which means it can keep tables as tables and lists as lists. Check this screen grab for extracting handwritten notes > https://imgur.com/fXk0tcR https://imgur.com/fXk0tcR [1]: https://llmwhisperer.unstract.com/ https://llmwhisperer.unstract.com/ [2]: Try it with your document here > https://pg.llmwhisperer.unstract.com/ https://pg.llmwhisperer.unstract.com/ [edited] added links
- throwaway211 2y agoCan you read them? Speech to text perhaps. That can also be done locally. If a note's a minute, 1000 notes are around 16 hours of reading. Scale time needed depending on if it takes less or more than a minute to read. Add a note reference to the start of each recording, like a zettelkasten, so the scanned file, recording and text cross-reference. If assessing other solutions, that's at least an upper bound on the cost of any other solution.
- canadaduane 2y agoUsing MacWhisper (or other similar whisper.cpp app or utility), you could do it all on-device for a free or one-time fee, too. note: I have no relation to MacWhisper, just a happy customer.
- ujkiolp 2y agoBad solution simply because of information loss! * after STT, there is objectively less info in the storage format * OP cannot take advantage of rapidly advancing OCR tech on the storage * inevitably OP might end up saving the originals “just in case”- rendering this entire process useless
- rahimnathwani 2y agoUsing STT today doesn't stop OP from also storing high resolution scans for the future.
- bambax 2y agoGreat solution. And, if the notes don't contain confidential information, you could totally hire someone on Fiverr to read them for you. Or on Mechanical Turk, have the same notes be read more than once by different people, so you can compare and more easily find errors in transcription later.
- giantg2 2y agoI have a similar issue but reading them won't work because the person who wrote them passed away. It there another solution that could transcribe this sort of thing (maybe the original use case would have been for historical texts)?
- sjhaba 2y agoHave you tried chatgpt? 10k image requests should be pretty cheap
- mariocesar 2y agoIt seems like using speech-to-text is a faster alternative. You can also consider outsourcing the work. I know abbyy.com offers a service for this. Even though you may not be their target market, they have services for implementing hybrid machine learning and data entry solutions. If you're into dreaming up cool solutions, you could try using smart pens or tablets to write stuff and then teach a model to recognize your handwriting. But for now, it's just a dream.
- GianFabien 2y agoI have about 5000 pages of research notes. I have found that the quality and usefulness of the material varies greatly. Much of the older material is of little relevance with the passing of time. As futile it may seem, I'm finding that re-reading and summarizing rather than straight transcribing is effective. I'm refreshing my memory of what I did discover and only typing up what is relevant now. Fortunately I'm a fast touch typist, so I can stare at the handwritten page and type; only glancing at the screen after a paragraph or two. Two things I find useful to retain are the dates of the original materials and bibliographic references.
- kqr 2y agoThis is important, I think. Allen Ward expands on the topic of "reusable knowledge" standing in contrast to putting notes in a binder and sticking the binder in a cabinet somewhere and then pretending you have stored knowledge. For knowledge to be reusable, it needs to be actively maintained, curated, summarised, integrated. It takes work so one shouldn't bother at all if one doesn't expect to want to refer to it later.
- bckr 2y agoI think this is the best approach for project-related information. It’s essentially the Second Brain approach. I’m interested in these journals for autobiographical / psychiatric reasons. Therefore, indeed, the more recent information is more valuable, but not with such a steep drop-off. The oldest 10% might contain 5% of the value.
- dankwizard 2y agoin the time its taken you to look into this and procrastinate, you could have done it by hand greener pastures
- bckr 2y agoIndeed—except for the cost of time, attention, energy, wrist and neck pain. This is something I want done eventually, and I’m smelling the flowers on the way there. This HN comment thread is one of the flowers on the path to my OCR pure land zen state
- garblegarble 2y agoHaving experience of this, it's fun to explore technological solutions but at the end of the day, re-reading while transcribing is a lot more enjoyable than quality checking and correcting OCR results - especially if you have bad handwriting. Good luck with whatever approach you choose!
- heavyset_go 2y agoYou might be able to manually transcribe some of the notes and then fine tune an existing handwriting recognition model using them.
- bckr 2y agoYep, I think that’s what I’ll need to do in the end because my handwriting is just so… expressive. In order to get that data I’ll probably need to chop up the words in my diaries for privacy, then outsource to a human-in-the-loop labeling service.
- Sandr44 2y agoI have scanning my handwritten notes also on my todo-list, some of them are even taken digitally. I have noticed that the offline ocr on Samsung (or maybe on Android devices generally) is pretty good, even with characters that don’t exist in English. Unfortunately there don’t seem to be implementations for batch scanning with Android handwriting ml kit or Samsung vision ocr
- pininja 2y agoWhich off the shelf solutions have you tried?
- bckr 2y agoThanks for asking, I’ve tried at least: - Google Cloud OCR - Transkribus - ChatGPT(4V) - EasyOCR - Tesseract - MacOS text highlighting
- ogurechny 2y agoThere's Yandex OCR (1.2 cents per image with handwriting model). https://yandex.cloud/en/docs/vision/pricing https://yandex.cloud/en/docs/vision/pricing https://yandex.cloud/en/docs/vision/operations/ocr/text-detection-handwritten https://yandex.cloud/en/docs/vision/operations/ocr/text-dete... Not sure about their training on English content, but they made a search engine for parish registers kept in a number of local archives last year (in Russian): https://habr.com/en/companies/yandex/articles/712510/ https://habr.com/en/companies/yandex/articles/712510/
- t312227 2y agohello, imho. (!) * if you have a lot of "uniform" pages - read something like A4 -, get yourself a scanner with an automatic sheet-feeder or throw some rainy-weekend afternoons on it & scan your notes with some decent SOHO scanner * don't get too excessive with resolution, 400+ pixels/inch are enough for OCR ... i always scan with 1200 and reduce the images to 600 px via simple batch-processing / for example imagemagick "convert". * get yourself a decent OCR software, which is able to read your notes ... i'm a big fan of abbyys "finereader", but sadly its prohibitively expensive ... ;) idk how well FOSS OCR software a la tesseract works for hand-written notes. * create pdfs with automatically detected text in the background for search and the scanned image of the notes. it additionally generates XML-metadata & from there: whatever you want (web frontend ... :) just my 0.02€
- bckr 2y agoThanks buddy. I’ve already got them all digitized thankfully. That was a whole thing in and of itself. Unfortunately the half-dozen or so OCRs I’ve tried fail miserably on even my clearest pages. Lots of good ideas in this thread, though. Thank you!
- sid- 2y agolive text is an iOS feature you could experiment with
- SrFil 2y agoWhich off the shelf solutions have you tried? https://www.transkribus.org/ https://www.transkribus.org/ is generally pretty good with hard to read texts.
- praving5 2y agoIf those notes are really worthy and meaningful to you, then hire someone to type them out for you. If there is something that money can buy, then save your time!
- bckr 2y agoYou’re right, and thanks to another one of the commenters, I have an idea for how I could do this. Take my journals, and run a relatively simple word separation algorithm over them. Shuffle up those words and pay to have them annotated. Reconstruct the dataset from there.
- smusamashah 2y agoIt might be better to provide 2 3 words of context with each separated word. My handwriting is often bad, and I sometimes have to guess a word based on context.
- piloto_ciego 2y agoI just tried ChatGPT on my handwritten notes, OCR can very seldom recognize my handwriting and it nailed it. It’s cheap, you should give that a shot.
- d13 2y agoSeconded. GPT4 can do this perfectly.
- d1sxeyes 2y agoHm. It depends how much you care about accuracy. ChatGPT does a great job overall, but I have found frequent errors and hallucinations around numbers, names, and dates in particular. If you do go for GPT-4, just be careful of this. Where other transcription services might fail, or give some implausible output which highlights that you need to check the source, ChatGPT might give a highly plausible but incorrect transcription from which you might not immediately identify that transcription has failed.
- piloto_ciego 2y agoChatGPT-4o only hallucinated on my son’s god awful handwriting with mathematics, mine is pretty bad and it still did fine. What’s funny is my son made an error in the arithmetic and ChatGPT corrected it - that was the hallucination.
- Nevolihs 2y agoIdeally OP would keep the source images of the original journal pages around even after transcription. I think ChatGPT (or LLM in general) is probably the best option, but the best overall solution would accept that LLMs are flawed and would require long-term iteration.
- d1sxeyes 2y agoThe problem with ChatGPT is that you might not know to check the original. If the original text is “I’m getting married on the 10th July”, you’ll know to check the handwritten note if it says “I’m getting married on the l@ July” but not necessarily if it says “on the 16th July”. ChatGPT seems to do the second quite often.
- dougdimmadome 2y agoI was in a similar situation last month. Not quite 1000s of pages but close to 100. Just enough to make typing them out seem like too much work. I found an app online (I wont even name it) which promised incredibly accurate handwriting transcription. Signed up and found it was true, but they were just sending images directly to chatGPT and returning the result and then charging a fee on top. I started working on an open source version. It took me only a few hours and I'm sure anyone else could pull it together. used chatGPT example code to connect to API and send an image with a prompt along the lines of "please transcribe the text in this image and return only that, nothing else". even with that instruction it still sometimes prefaces with "sure! I can do that.", which I think is the AI equivalent of Homer Simpson writing "ok" in the "please leave this section blank" part of the form. Anyhoo, I had a basic job queue written, pull in images in order of file creation date and fire them off, append the text to a text file after. There was some cleanup of the file required (weird line breaks) but it saved me days of typing. You still need a chatGPT API key for it but it does take a good bit of the work out. At the moment I'm investigating using a free local model. LLava is just as accurate but takes longer than sending it to ChatGPT. but if you were worried about burning credits it would be the way to go.
- canucker2016 2y agoHow about creating a crowdsourced captcha service? Take scans of your journal pages, split the jpegs/pics into word fragments, display a couple of fragments to captcha clients, generate completed journal entries when the consensus gets reasonably high for each word fragment. Not sure how captcha services start from scratch - probably ask around/check with google search. Privacy goes out the door, but you should be able to show disjointed word fragments so no one could reconstruct enough of a single journal entry to expose your more personal info unless they were very determined. Or maybe split the scans into individual letter fragments instead? Then monetize this for other people in the same situation...
- Suppafly 2y ago>Then monetize this for other people in the same situation... That's basically what Amazon Mechanical Turk is, without the captcha bit.
- bckr 2y agoI love this idea. It’s way overengineered for this problem, and I already have a startup that requires my complete attention, but thank you for writing this out. And if anyone decides to do this, let me know! Privacy is one of the reasons I would pay for a service like this, rather than pay a person to (try) to do it. These journals contain a lot of psychiatric-level information about me, which is both what makes it valuable and sensitive.
- user_agent 2y agoA hint that might help at least partially: novadays for managing digital and handwritten notes I juse Joplin, but before that I was an avid Evernote user. Having a paid plan active gives you access to Evernote's OCR function on their backend. I had a lot of handwritten notes uploaded as attachments to Evernote, and I remember that despite my handwritnig being awful their softwre was able to parse it and allow me to, among others, perform quite advanced searches on my handwritten notes. I'm not sure if there's a way to make Evernote's OCR backend work for you in scenarios more elastic that what it's been built for, but I wanted to menion that there's this unique OCR tech that I think does far better job that any standalone OCR software I tried (for my handwriting style which I consider awful). It might be worth researching further for you.
- disqard 2y agoI used to use Evernote for a while, and like you, was a fan of its handwriting OCR. Sadly, it is no longer software I would recommend: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36609641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36609641
- EasyMark 2y agoBe careful about Evernote, they got bought out by a somewhat questionable company that has a history of buying up companies and basically not improving them like the old owners.
- brudgers 2y agoCan you think of anything better than just opening every single file and manually transcribing it? No, because the work of manual transcription is a way of telling if transcribing them is worth doing. Or maybe pay someone to transcribe it. Spending money is also a good way to tell if something matters (assuming you have sufficient money). Orthogonally, maybe building a system is what you really want to do (for many people that would be more enjoyable than revisiting old journal content). Finally, starting from hand transcription is an entry point into rewriting what you wrote. Rewriting is writing and if there's publication on your roadmap, you will be rewriting anyway. There's no easy way to write well. Good luck.
- bckr 2y ago> No, because the work of manual transcription is a way of telling if transcribing them is worth doing. Yes, for a percent of the work. I have spent a bunch of time already digitizing my journals (including a loooong detour where I had to organize them because I didn’t exactly have them in chronological order…) I have seen and manually transcribed enough of my journals to know I want the rest. But it’s not worth it to do it manually at this time. > Orthogonally, maybe building a system is what you really want to do (for many people that would be more enjoyable than revisiting old journal content). And I do want to build a system to do this, as part of my own personal mind bike. Thanks for your comment.
- workergnome 2y agoI know you've said you've looked at off-the shelf tools, but in that did you consider https://www.transkribus.org/ https://www.transkribus.org/? It's a tool designed for reading historical, hand-written documentation—gets used a lot in archives and historical studies. Might be worth an evaluation to see if your handwriting is not great in similar ways to Dutch bankers from the 18th century.
- bckr 2y agoI did have a look at transkribus and their models did not work for my needs.
- tmaly 2y agoI record myself reading my hand written notes, then I just upload the mp3 of the recording to MS 365 to transcribe. I put special stop words like highlight/return so then I can post process and ensure the markdown formatting looks good.
- ProllyInfamous 2y agoWhisper.app will do this locally on Apple Silicon, FYI.
- mkl 2y agoWhisper.cpp will do it locally on anything.
- fred_is_fred 2y agoWould this work with Mechanical Turk? I wonder how much it would be.
- TheMiddleMan 2y agoI've found decent success with Googles Cloud Vision API for transcribing cursive writing on the backs of 1000s of family photos. https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/handwriting https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/handwriting I threw together a basic UI with the transcribed text in an editable area next to the image where I would edit any adjustments as it wasn't 100% perfect.
- daemonologist 2y agoYeah OCR remains an area where the open source solutions can't quite compete on quality with what the cloud providers offer. I've found that (unless you have a cost-prohibitive number of documents to process) if there are complex layouts, handwriting, etc. it's worth going to Google or AWS.
- bckr 2y agoThanks! I did try the vision demo in the console. One problem might be that my handwriting is idiosyncratic / there may be more training data available for historical handwriting styles?
- hliyan 2y agoI have this same issue. Got 25 years worth of journals written in cursive that's a bit... non-standard.
- 999900000999 2y agoTake a picture, upload it to chat GPT and see what happens. If it works then scan all the pages and run though it with a script. Shouldn't take you more than about an hour to code ( with Chat GPT!) in Python.
- bckr 2y agoIndeed ChatGPT is one of the solutions I tried.
- 999900000999 2y agoIf you don't care about personal privacy, I would probably just go on Fiverr and upload it to somebody to do it at like $5 a page. Even reading all the journal notes is going to be very tiring.
- ProllyInfamous 2y agoI presume not well, then [since you're again asking]?
- bckr 2y agoOf course. If ChatGPT worked for this problem, I’d be in human-machine interface heaven. Oh well.
- ProllyInfamous 2y agoYour journaling must not be as insane as mine..?