What are the latest recommendations for handwriting recognition please? I have a large volume of handwritten family notes from my elderly mother and want to ‘OCR’ capture these into text.
I have scanned them into PDF but am wondering what tool will most accurately turn them into text. As all the notes are written by one person, are there apps that can be trained to be more accurate if the writing is consistent?
Don’t mind if the app is Mac or iOS. Thanks all.
There was a thread about this, and I got insight there that Google Drive + Google Docs has a very good handwriting recognition. Here is my reply on that thread:
Some people has mixed feelings on using Google’s service, but maybe it can be your last resort. 
I’ve had good luck with GoodNotes on iOS.
I would second GoodNotes as well. Apple Pencil and iPad…sweet! The app is on my MBP only for reading what I have written on iPad.
Good call @ybbond . 
I tried Google Docs and the results are excellent. Not 100% accurate as you would expect but I have 31 pages pretty good text of my mothers notes to now go through. Very happy and a great solution.
glad it helps!
the result is not the same as other OCR technologies, in which the text will be placed as invisible layer on top of the scanned image. Google’s approach just put text below the images, but sometime this approach is more useful and concise.
Has anyone heard of a tool that would ask you to write some sample text to train its model on your handwriting?
I am not a machine-learning expert, but my understanding of the handwriting OCR challenges is that there are endless handwriting styles and you account for all… Training a tool specifically for one script seems achievable.
The trouble with that is people like me who have two handwriting styles:
I’ve no idea which I’m going to emit.
As long as there is no intersection between your “childhood tidy” and your “sociopathic scrawl” it should be fine! … Now if your tidy “e” is a sociopathic “a”, that becomes a trickier affair 