In my experience, you can only get handwriting recognition to work well enough by doing it in real time. OCR works best with high-quality printed materials and worst of all with handwriting, so you’re not starting from the best position. The same software wouldn’t have the domain expertise to cope with a Russian-speaking coroner who liked to include Sanskrit quotations in his handwritten autopsies. For example, it’s possible to recognise the English names for numbers and the names of major UK cities, especially if you can get people to write each letter in its own little box. That is to say, if the input is close to perfect, the output can also be close to perfect.īut in practice, it works best when dealing with restricted inputs and/or limited domains. The idea of converting written or printed text into digital text is generally called OCR for optical character recognition, and it has similar problems to speech recognition. Are you aware of a tool from Google or anyone else that can do a good job of this, please? Michael
I’ve noticed that Google’s ability to read text from photos has vastly improved in recent months. To type them all in would take a very long time. I have many A4 pads of handwritten notes, which I would like to convert into Microsoft Word documents.
