Surely the true prize is to be able to ditch computers altogether and just write with pencil on paper.
The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition
11–20 of 116 posts
Re: The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition
#12> Here’s Transkribus’s best guess at George’s letter to Maryann, above:
Transkribus got a new model architecture around the corner and the results look impressive. Not only for trivial cases like text, but also for table structures and layouting.
Best of all, you can train it on your own corpus of text to support obscure languages and handwriting systems.
Really looking forward to it.
Re: The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition
#13Call me when it can do Russian Cursive.
Seems to do an OK job: https://g.co/gemini/share/e173d18d1d80 This is a random image from Twitter with no transcript or English translation provided, so it's not going to be in the training data.
That's Gemini 2.5 Flash btw
The result from Gemini 3 Pro using the default media resolution (the medium one): "(Заголовок / Header): Арсеньев (Фамилия / Surname - likely "Arsenyev")
Состояние удовл-
t N, кожные
покровы чистые,
[л/у не увел.]
В зеве умерен. [умеренная]
гипер. [гиперемия]
В легких дыха-
ние жесткое, хрипов
нет. Тоны серд-
[ца] [ритм]ичные.
Живот мяг-
кий, б/б [безболезненный].
мочеисп. [мочеиспускание] своб. [свободное]
Ds: ОРЗ [или ОРВИ]" and with the translation: "Arsenyev
Re: The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition
#14I became convinced of this after the release of KuroNet: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.09433 (High-quality OCR of Japanese manuscripts, which look almost impossible to read.)
Re: The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition
#15Maybe for English, for the other human languages I use, it is still kind of hit and miss, just like speaking recognition, even with English it suffices to have an accent that is off the standard TV one.
As always, this depends on the amount of training data available. Japanese is another success story: https://digitalorientalist.com/2020/02/18/cursive-japanese-a...
Re: The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition
#16Great post and amazing progress in this field! However, I have to wonder if some of these letters were part of the training data for Gemini, since they are well-known and someone has probably already done the painstaking work of transcribing them...
I have a personal corpus of letters between my grandparents in WW2. My grandfather fighting in Europe and my grandmother in England. The ability of Claude and ChatGPT to transcribe them is extremely impressive. Though I haven’t worked on them in months and this uses older models. At that time neither system could properly organize pages though and chatGPT would sometimes skip a paragraph.
Re: The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition
#17The writing is on the wall for handwriting. Zoomers use speech recognition or touchscreen keyboards, millennials use keyboards. Boomers use pens
Re: The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition
#18Maybe for English, for the other human languages I use, it is still kind of hit and miss, just like speaking recognition, even with English it suffices to have an accent that is off the standard TV one.
As always, this depends on the amount of training data available. Japanese is another success story: https://digitalorientalist.com/2020/02/18/cursive-japanese-a...
Interesting, thanks for sharing.
Re: The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition
#19Great post and amazing progress in this field! However, I have to wonder if some of these letters were part of the training data for Gemini, since they are well-known and someone has probably already done the painstaking work of transcribing them...
Possibly, but given it can also read my handwriting- which is much, MUCH worse than Boole’s - with better accuracy than any human I’ve given it to- that’s probably not the explanation.
Re: The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition
#20Great post and amazing progress in this field! However, I have to wonder if some of these letters were part of the training data for Gemini, since they are well-known and someone has probably already done the painstaking work of transcribing them...
I have a personal corpus of letters between my grandparents in WW2. My grandfather fighting in Europe and my grandmother in England. The ability of Claude and ChatGPT to transcribe them is extremely impressive. Though I haven’t worked on them in months and this uses older models. At that time neither system could properly organize pages though and chatGPT would sometimes skip a paragraph.
I've also been working on half a dozen crates of old family letters. ChatGPT does well with them and is especially good at summarizing the letters. Unfortunately, all the output still has to be verified because it hallucinates words and phrases and drops lines here and there. So at this point, I still transcribe them by hand, because the verification process is actually more tiresome than just typing them up in the first place. Maybe I should just have ChatGPT verify MY transcriptions instead.