I 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.
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.