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Scribble – Convert handwriting into digital text

getscribblenow.com

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Re: Scribble – Convert handwriting into digital text

#41

Post by mlaskin »

Dimi9909 wrote: post #11

this kinda thing was well studied and developed nearly 30 years ago already..... Deep leaning, ML are all hypes.

Thank you for commenting!

ML / NN have been around for a while, but there are a few reasons Scribble is only possible now:

1) Although classifying MNIST digits is the "hello world" of ML, doing the same with notes is substantially more difficult. The algorithm has to figure out sentence structure, punctuation, paragraph breaks, lists, and tons of other features that are hard to train. This problem is still a major research topic academically.

2) As a corollary to (1), while OCR has been around for a while, handwriting OCR has never worked due to (1).

3) Computing power has never been so cheap, training the algorithm would have been very expensive before AWS / Azure / etc abstracted hardware and made it inexpensive

Re: Scribble – Convert handwriting into digital text

#42

Post by ncr100 »

mlaskin wrote: post #35
urbanj wrote: post #4

This could be awesome when combined with Rocketbook

great suggestion! We love Rocketbook

Or the Remarkable tablet (paging user @sandsmark)? They're looking for a digital handwriting transcription solution to consider augmenting their focused writing product.

Re: Scribble – Convert handwriting into digital text

#43

Post by bradfordarner »

muglug wrote: post #40
bradfordarner wrote: post #38

Great MVP pitch! After signing up for the Beta, it hit me. Every single bit of this could have been staged without having done any coding at all!! Brilliant!! I'm not sure if that is actually the case, but theoretically it is totally possible. This is a great example of the classic MVP pitch: validate interest before building.

Well, at least part of it was staged. The handwriting on the left differs from the Google Doc: - Handwriting: "The plan is simple:" - Google Doc: "The plan is simple and brilliant. Here are the steps:" https://youtu.be/6bhoj1wr30Y?t=2m13s

Nice good catch!

I totally think this was all staged. I would love to think that they've made some huge innovation in OCR.

In any case, it is a good example of an MVP.

Re: Scribble – Convert handwriting into digital text

#44

Post by mlaskin »

muglug wrote: post #40
bradfordarner wrote: post #38

Great MVP pitch! After signing up for the Beta, it hit me. Every single bit of this could have been staged without having done any coding at all!! Brilliant!! I'm not sure if that is actually the case, but theoretically it is totally possible. This is a great example of the classic MVP pitch: validate interest before building.

Well, at least part of it was staged. The handwriting on the left differs from the Google Doc: - Handwriting: "The plan is simple:" - Google Doc: "The plan is simple and brilliant. Here are the steps:" https://youtu.be/6bhoj1wr30Y?t=2m13s

Yep, that's fair.

We staged the google doc bc there is still a 10-30 sec lag time in sending the note out, we'll fix it up. Thank you for the call out!

Re: Scribble – Convert handwriting into digital text

#45

Post by mlaskin »

sttop wrote: post #39

Love the idea and really wish you already supported other languages! By the way, you have a problem with your demo video: around the 2:10 mark of the video you can see that the first phrase of the .docx file has a lot more content than the written note... While the note contains: 'The plan is simple', the document contains: 'The plan is simple and brilliant. Here are the steps'. I'm not questioning your tech, but if…

Good call out, we'll edit the video description

Re: Scribble – Convert handwriting into digital text

#47

Post by mlaskin »

dyarosla wrote: post #31

I think that although handwriting won't be going away for some time, I've come to find that I'm using digital mediums for note-taking more often and it's becoming more popular (see Apple Pencil, Surface Pro Pen). If this service were coupled to an app that supported writing with a digital pen, it would be more appealing to many; it would mitigate the need to snap a photo, mitigate the need to have paper, and still al…

Thanks for commenting!

Adding digital handwriting support is a great idea. I actually think other companies do it pretty well, which is why we didn't go down that route. The reason is that they use a different type of algorithm that learns, in part, from the handwriting velocity, and gives you edit access on the go, which is not possible if you've taken the notes in a normal notebook.

We decided to start with plain notebook text mainly because it seemed like no one else had solved this problem to our satisfaction yet.

Re: Scribble – Convert handwriting into digital text

#48

Post by IanCal »

literallycancer wrote: post #28
mootothemax wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>European numbers vs American numbers (the 1 especially)? Honestly I think 9 will be the bigger issue, to my eyes the European version is near identical to lower-case G.

You mean q? Because g has that loop at the end.

Both, really. Check out this small sample from MNIST

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Amaury_Lendasse/publica...

Re: Scribble – Convert handwriting into digital text

#49

Post by IanCal »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #34
etiam wrote: post #22

Nice! Maybe I won't need to implement this myself then. Now if only someone would release designs for an affordable, reliable, non-destructive robot to do the physical data collection... My backlog of notes is way to big to stand around snapping cell phone photos at all of it manually.

Or a service that sends you a box where you could use your records, send it to them to digitalize.

There are a bunch of services that do this and return OCR'd documents and images, perhaps it could be interesting to partner with one of them? I assume they're already paying for OCR licenses.

Re: Scribble – Convert handwriting into digital text

#50

Post by darklajid »

dyarosla wrote: post #31

I think that although handwriting won't be going away for some time, I've come to find that I'm using digital mediums for note-taking more often and it's becoming more popular (see Apple Pencil, Surface Pro Pen). If this service were coupled to an app that supported writing with a digital pen, it would be more appealing to many; it would mitigate the need to snap a photo, mitigate the need to have paper, and still al…

No. I'm working for a company that offers DMS and OCR services.

A big business atm are cheques. I .. don't understand what they're for, consider them weird. But there is a huuge number of places that use them, the US is a part of that for some reason.

A lot of those are filled in by hand.

Say, you're doing a census project. You send out forms that WILL be filled in by hand.

That said, I don't believe in silver bullets here...

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