On: Ask HN: How to transcribe 1000s of handwritten not...

[TheMiddleMan]

I've found decent success with Googles Cloud Vision API for transcribing cursive writing on the backs of 1000s of family photos.

https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/handwriting

I threw together a basic UI with the transcribed text in an editable area next to the image where I would edit any adjustments as it wasn't 100% perfect.

[bckr → TheMiddleMan]

Thanks! I did try the vision demo in the console. One problem might be that my handwriting is idiosyncratic / there may be more training data available for historical handwriting styles?

[hliyan → bckr]

I have this same issue. Got 25 years worth of journals written in cursive that's a bit... non-standard.

[daemonologist → TheMiddleMan]

Yeah OCR remains an area where the open source solutions can't quite compete on quality with what the cloud providers offer. I've found that (unless you have a cost-prohibitive number of documents to process) if there are complex layouts, handwriting, etc. it's worth going to Google or AWS.