7 ms·
Can 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
by throwaway211 2y ago
Can 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)?
- bcx 2y agoAdditionally, you could hire other people to read them, dividing the task into whatever manageable chunks or even having multiple people read the same parts for agreement. In the days before good software transcription I saved a ton of time I grad school by splitting up interviews and using mechanical Turk or up work ( can’t remember which one, to transcribe 1 minute snippets, and then took another pass)
- smarm52 2y agoSome good transcription solutions: https://zapier.com/blog/best-text-dictation-software/#windowsspeech https://zapier.com/blog/best-text-dictation-software/#window... https://otter.ai/ https://otter.ai/ (Haven't actually tried Otter, but it gets a LOT of good reviews.)
- mvkel 2y agoThis is the best answer. Any techie will desperately try to come up with a tech solution to this problem. A few months of development later, you might have something that yields trustworthy output. But 16 hours? No tech solution will be done faster than that. Don't build a factory for a one-off.
- PartiallyTyped 2y agoI mean, I'd totally try Tesseract[1], a few samples, and a python script. Shouldn't take more than 5 minutes to validate this. Adobe also has the whole scan thing, and apple can — in some cases — correctly transcribe characters from images. https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract
- motoxpro 2y agoI'd say any of the language models are far better than Tesseract. I did some work in this space and it was an absolute nightmare, event working with pdfs.
- mrazomor 2y agoTesseract out of the box is terrible for anything non standard. I tried using it for the comic books. Unusable. The training for your font is doable, but it's very time intensive (while the tools are pretty good!).
- radiantspace 2y agoHandwritten notes, cmon! Don't waste time on tesseract for that.
- 123yawaworht456 2y agofrom my experience with tesseract ~1 year ago, it was frequently fucking up even with crispy PNG screenshots I really doubt it can handle handwriting
- driscoll42 2y agoFor OCR of handwriting, I did some comparative analysis a year back, and I found that Tesseract was... not good. However TrOCR was okay, certainly the best of the FOSS solutions. But Textract from Amazon was the best one by far far for handwriting, though your mileage will vary
- dSebastien 2y agoYou made my day. It's obviously an awesome approach! Documented here: https://notes.dsebastien.net/30+Areas/33+Permanent+notes/33.02+Content/How+to+convert+notes+from+analog+to+digital https://notes.dsebastien.net/30+Areas/33+Permanent+notes/33....
- BetterWhisper 2y agoReading the notes aloud is a really good solution without having to spend a ton of time on trying to OCR handwriting. I can recommend https://www.videototextai.com/ https://www.videototextai.com/ for transcribing huge amounts of audio. (Disclaimer, I am the founder of VideoToTextAI)
- bckr 2y agoGreat recommendation, thank you. I have considered this and it’s definitely the simplest way to achieve what I want.
- jacknobody 2y agoIf you also gave all that text, with its audio, to the putative AI, it might have enough training material to learn to read your handwriting.
- bckr 2y agoAgreed!
- refulgentis 2y agoI've been working on an AI app for 18 months and almost replied to tell you no, AI cant do that. And, doh, took a minute, and realized I'm a dunce.* And now there's at least 3 I can think of off the top of my head, not to mention local. Training a handwriting recognition AI is universally accessible. What a time to be alive. * If you're dense like me: they're not saying "any AI" as "any handwriting recognition machine learning model you build from that dataset". They're saying as AI as any multimodal LLM, it'll do in context learning on what you upload.