The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition

Post by sph » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 12:58 PM UTC

vintermann wrote: post #30

sph wrote: post #25

Any self-hosted open source solution? I would like to digitize my paper notebooks but I do not want to use anything proprietary or that uses external services. What is the state of the art on the FOSS side? Ideally something that I can train with my own handwriting. I had a look at Tesseract, wondering if there’s anything better out there.

Regular handwriting there are many. Historical handwriting, Gemini 3 is the only one which gave a decent result on a 19th century minutes from a town court in Northern Norway (Danish gothic handwriting with bleed through). I'm not 100% sure it's correct, but that's because it's so dang hard to read it to verify it. At least I see it gets many names, dates and locations right. I've been waiting a long time for this.

Post by lifestyleguru » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 1:11 PM UTC

tpm wrote: post #31

lifestyleguru wrote: post #21

It feels unbelievable that in Europe literacy rate could be 10% of lower. Then I look at documents even as young as 150 years... fraktur, blackletter, elaborate handwritting. I guess I'm illiterate now. Hopefully next generations will feel the same about legal contracts, law in general, and Java code bases. They're incomprehensible not because of fonts but because of unfathomable complexity.

You can learn fraktur or blackletter in a day and cyrillic in a few days, if you already know the latin alphabet.

Post by embedding-shape » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 1:15 PM UTC

lccerina wrote: post #35

coolness wrote: post #2

Great 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...

Most likely, and probably inferring the structure on texts with "similar" writing forms. Tried with my handwriting (in italian) and the performance wasn't that stellar. More annoyingly, it is still a LLM and not a "pure" OCR, so some sentences were partially rephrased with different words than the one in the text. This is crucially problematic if they would be used to transcribe historical documents

Post by notimetorelax » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 1:16 PM UTC

benterix wrote: post #28

> If AI can diminish some of the monotony of research, perhaps we can spend more time thinking, writing, playing piano, and taking walks — with other people. Whenever any progress is made, this is the logical conclusion. And yet, those who decide about how your time is being used, have an opposing view.

Post by embedding-shape » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 1:17 PM UTC

vertnerd wrote: post #20

MrSkelter wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…